Large pre-trained language models contain societal biases and carry along these biases to downstream tasks. Current in-processing bias mitigation approaches (like adversarial training) impose debiasing by updating a model’s parameters, effectively transferring the model to a new, irreversible debiased state. In this work, we propose a novel approach to develop stand-alone debiasing functionalities separate from the model, which can be integrated into the model on-demand, while keeping the core model untouched. Drawing from the concept of AdapterFusion in multi-task learning, we introduce DAM (Debiasing with Adapter Modules) – a debiasing approach to first encapsulate arbitrary bias mitigation functionalities into separate adapters, and then add them to the model on-demand in order to deliver fairness qualities. We conduct a large set of experiments on three classification tasks with gender, race, and age as protected attributes. Our results show that DAM improves or maintains the effectiveness of bias mitigation, avoids catastrophic forgetting in a multi-attribute scenario, and maintains on-par task performance, while granting parameter-efficiency and easy switching between the original and debiased models.

In low-resource languages, the amount of training data is limited. Hence, the model has to perform well in unseen sentences and syntax on which the model has not trained. We propose a method that addresses the problem through an encoder and an ensemble of language models. A language-specific language model performed poorly when compared to a multilingual language model. So, the multilingual language model checkpoint is fine-tuned to a specific language. A novel approach of one hot encoder is introduced between the model outputs and the CRF to combine the results in an ensemble format. Our team, Infrrd.ai, competed in the MultiCoNER competition. The results are encouraging where the team is positioned within the top 10 positions. There is less than a 4% percent difference from the third position in most of the tracks that we participated in. The proposed method shows that the ensemble of models with a multilingual language model as the base with the help of an encoder performs better than a single language-specific model.

In this paper, we describe our approaches for task six of Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task in 2021. The task is to classify twitter tweets containing COVID-19 symptoms in three classes (self-reports, non-personal reports & literature/news mentions). We implemented BERT and XLNet for this text classification task. Best result was achieved by XLNet approach, which is F1 score 0.94, precision 0.9448 and recall 0.94448. This is slightly better than the average score, i.e. F1 score 0.93, precision 0.93235 and recall 0.93235.