English

Mitigating Gender Bias Amplification in Distribution by Posterior Regularization

Computation and Language 2020-05-14 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning Machine Learning

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 hidden in the corpus and further amplify it. However, their analysis is conducted only on models' top predictions. In this paper, we investigate the gender bias amplification issue from the distribution perspective and demonstrate that the bias 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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.06251,
  title  = {Mitigating Gender Bias Amplification in Distribution by Posterior Regularization},
  author = {Shengyu Jia and Tao Meng and Jieyu Zhao and Kai-Wei Chang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.06251},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

7 pages, 3 figures, published in ACL 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:30:43.339Z