Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP

Schick, Timo; Udupa, Sahana and Schütze, Hinrich (17. December 2021): Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP. In: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 9: pp. 1408-1424

Abstract

When trained on large, unfiltered crawls from the Internet, language models pick up and reproduce all kinds of undesirable biases that can be found in the data: They often generate racist, sexist, violent, or otherwise toxic language. As large models require millions of training examples to achieve good performance, it is difficult to completely prevent them from being exposed to such content. In this paper, we first demonstrate a surprising finding: Pretrained language models recognize, to a considerable degree, their undesirable biases and the toxicity of the content they produce. We refer to this capability as self-diagnosis. Based on this finding, we then propose a decoding algorithm that, given only a textual description of the undesired behavior, reduces the probability of a language model producing problematic text. We refer to this approach as self-debiasing. Self-debiasing does not rely on manually curated word lists, nor does it require any training data or changes to the model’s parameters. While we by no means eliminate the issue of language models generating biased text, we believe our approach to be an important step in this direction.

• Item Type: Journal article
• EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: 740516
• EU Projects: Horizon 2020 > ERC Grants > ERC Advanced Grant > ERC Grant 740516: NonSequeToR - Non-sequence models for tokenization replacement
• Form of publication: Publisher's Version
• Faculties: Cultural Studies > Department of Ancient and Modern Cultures > Ethnology
• Research Centers: Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS)
• Subjects: 000 Computer science, information and general works > 000 Computer science, knowledge, and systems; 400 Language > 400 Language; 400 Language > 410 Linguistics
• Language: English