Gender-preserving Debiasing for Pre-trained Word Embeddings

Masahiro Kaneko, Danushka Bollegala


Abstract
Word embeddings learnt from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases such as gender, racial or ethnic biases, which in turn bias the down-stream NLP applications that use those word embeddings. Taking gender-bias as a working example, we propose a debiasing method that preserves non-discriminative gender-related information, while removing stereotypical discriminative gender biases from pre-trained word embeddings. Specifically, we consider four types of information: feminine, masculine, gender-neutral and stereotypical, which represent the relationship between gender vs. bias, and propose a debiasing method that (a) preserves the gender-related information in feminine and masculine words, (b) preserves the neutrality in gender-neutral words, and (c) removes the biases from stereotypical words. Experimental results on several previously proposed benchmark datasets show that our proposed method can debias pre-trained word embeddings better than existing SoTA methods proposed for debiasing word embeddings while preserving gender-related but non-discriminative information.
Anthology ID:
P19-1160
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1641–1650
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1160
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1160
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Masahiro Kaneko and Danushka Bollegala. 2019. Gender-preserving Debiasing for Pre-trained Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1641–1650, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gender-preserving Debiasing for Pre-trained Word Embeddings (Kaneko & Bollegala, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1160.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1160.mp4
Code
 kanekomasahiro/gp_debias