Sociodemographic bias in language models (LMs) has the potential for harm when deployed in real-world settings. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the past decade of research on sociodemographic bias in LMs, organized into a typology that facilitates examining the different aims: types of bias, quantifying bias, and debiasing techniques. We track the evolution of the latter two questions, then identify current trends and their limitations, as well as emerging techniques. To guide future research towards more effective and reliable solutions, and to help authors situate their work within this broad landscape, we conclude with a checklist of open questions.

Privacy policies are crucial for informing users about data practices, yet their length and complexity often deter users from reading them. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to identify and visualize data practices within privacy policies at different levels of detail. Leveraging crowd-sourced annotations from the ToS;DR platform, we experiment with various methods to match policy excerpts with predefined data practice descriptions. We further conduct a case study to evaluate our approach on a real-world policy, demonstrating its effectiveness in simplifying complex policies. Experiments show that our approach accurately matches data practice descriptions with policy excerpts, facilitating the presentation of simplified privacy information to users.

We conduct an inquiry into the sociotechnical aspects of sentiment analysis (SA) by critically examining 189 peer-reviewed papers on their applications, models, and datasets. Our investigation stems from the recognition that SA has become an integral component of diverse sociotechnical systems, exerting influence on both social and technical users. By delving into sociological and technological literature on sentiment, we unveil distinct conceptualizations of this term in domains such as finance, government, and medicine. Our study exposes a lack of explicit definitions and frameworks for characterizing sentiment, resulting in potential challenges and biases. To tackle this issue, we propose an ethics sheet encompassing critical inquiries to guide practitioners in ensuring equitable utilization of SA. Our findings underscore the significance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach to defining sentiment in SA and offer a pragmatic solution for its implementation.

Little attention is placed on analyzing nationality bias in language models, especially when nationality is highly used as a factor in increasing the performance of social NLP models. This paper examines how a text generation model, GPT-2, accentuates pre-existing societal biases about country-based demonyms. We generate stories using GPT-2 for various nationalities and use sensitivity analysis to explore how the number of internet users and the country’s economic status impacts the sentiment of the stories. To reduce the propagation of biases through large language models (LLM), we explore the debiasing method of adversarial triggering. Our results show that GPT-2 demonstrates significant bias against countries with lower internet users, and adversarial triggering effectively reduces the same.

We analyze sentiment analysis and toxicity detection models to detect the presence of explicit bias against people with disability (PWD). We employ the bias identification framework of Perturbation Sensitivity Analysis to examine conversations related to PWD on social media platforms, specifically Twitter and Reddit, in order to gain insight into how disability bias is disseminated in real-world social settings. We then create the Bias Identification Test in Sentiment (BITS) corpus to quantify explicit disability bias in any sentiment analysis and toxicity detection models. Our study utilizes BITS to uncover significant biases in four open AIaaS (AI as a Service) sentiment analysis tools, namely TextBlob, VADER, Google Cloud Natural Language API, DistilBERT and two toxicity detection models, namely two versions of Toxic-BERT. Our findings indicate that all of these models exhibit statistically significant explicit bias against PWD.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have been shown to exhibit sociodemographic biases, such as against gender and race, raising concerns of downstream biases in language technologies. However, PLMs’ biases against people with disabilities (PWDs) have received little attention, in spite of their potential to cause similar harms. Using perturbation sensitivity analysis, we test an assortment of popular word embedding-based and transformer-based PLMs and show significant biases against PWDs in all of them. The results demonstrate how models trained on large corpora widely favor ableist language.