Share this page:

On the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Fairness Evaluation Metrics for Contextualized Language Representations

Yang Trista Cao, Yada Pruksachatkun, Kai-Wei Chang, Rahul Gupta, Varun Kumar, Jwala Dhamala, and Aram Galstyan, in ACL (short), 2022.

Download the full text


Abstract

Multiple metrics have been introduced to measure fairness in various natural language processing tasks. These metrics can be roughly categorized into two categories: 1) \emphextrinsic metrics for evaluating fairness in downstream applications and 2) \emphintrinsic metrics for estimating fairness in upstream contextualized language representation models. In this paper, we conduct an extensive correlation study between intrinsic and extrinsic metrics across bias notions using 19 contextualized language models. We find that intrinsic and extrinsic metrics do not necessarily correlate in their original setting, even when correcting for metric misalignments, noise in evaluation datasets, and confounding factors such as experiment configuration for extrinsic metrics.


Bib Entry

@inproceedings{trista2022evaluation,
  title = {On the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Fairness Evaluation Metrics for Contextualized Language Representations},
  author = {Cao, Yang Trista and Pruksachatkun, Yada and Chang, Kai-Wei and Gupta, Rahul and Kumar, Varun and Dhamala, Jwala and Galstyan, Aram},
  booktitle = {ACL (short)},
  year = {2022}
}

Related Publications

  1. A Meta-Evaluation of Measuring LLM Misgendering, COLM 2025, 2025
  2. White Men Lead, Black Women Help? Benchmarking Language Agency Social Biases in LLMs, ACL, 2025
  3. Controllable Generation via Locally Constrained Resampling, ICLR, 2025
  4. On Localizing and Deleting Toxic Memories in Large Language Models, NAACL-Finding, 2025
  5. Attribute Controlled Fine-tuning for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Detoxification, EMNLP-Finding, 2024
  6. Mitigating Bias for Question Answering Models by Tracking Bias Influence, NAACL, 2024
  7. Are you talking to ['xem'] or ['x', 'em']? On Tokenization and Addressing Misgendering in LLMs with Pronoun Tokenization Parity, NAACL-Findings, 2024
  8. Are Personalized Stochastic Parrots More Dangerous? Evaluating Persona Biases in Dialogue Systems, EMNLP-Finding, 2023
  9. Kelly is a Warm Person, Joseph is a Role Model: Gender Biases in LLM-Generated Reference Letters, EMNLP-Findings, 2023
  10. The Tail Wagging the Dog: Dataset Construction Biases of Social Bias Benchmarks, ACL (short), 2023
  11. Factoring the Matrix of Domination: A Critical Review and Reimagination of Intersectionality in AI Fairness, AIES, 2023
  12. How well can Text-to-Image Generative Models understand Ethical Natural Language Interventions?, EMNLP (Short), 2022
  13. Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challenges, ACL, 2021
  14. "Nice Try, Kiddo": Investigating Ad Hominems in Dialogue Responses, NAACL, 2021
  15. BOLD: Dataset and metrics for measuring biases in open-ended language generation, FAccT, 2021
  16. Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, EMNLP-Finding, 2020
  17. The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation, EMNLP (short), 2019