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Mitigating Gender Bias Amplification in Distribution by Posterior Regularization

Shengyu Jia, Tao Meng, Jieyu Zhao, and Kai-Wei Chang, in ACL (short), 2020.

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Abstract

Advanced machine learning techniques have boosted the performance of natural language processing. Nevertheless, recent studies, e.g., Zhao et al. (2017) show that these techniques inadvertently capture the societal bias hiddenin the corpus and further amplify it. However,their analysis is conducted only on models’ top predictions. In this paper, we investigate thegender bias amplification issue from the distribution perspective and demonstrate that thebias is amplified in the view of predicted probability distribution over labels. We further propose a bias mitigation approach based on posterior regularization. With little performance loss, our method can almost remove the bias amplification in the distribution. Our study sheds the light on understanding the bias amplification.

Bib Entry

@inproceedings{jia2020mitigating,
  author = {Jia, Shengyu and Meng, Tao and Zhao, Jieyu and Chang, Kai-Wei},
  title = {Mitigating Gender Bias Amplification in Distribution by Posterior Regularization},
  booktitle = {ACL (short)},
  year = {2020},
  presentation_id = {https://virtual.acl2020.org/paper_main.264.html}
}

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