Stereotyping Norwegian Salmon: An Inventory of Pitfalls in Fairness Benchmark Datasets
Su Lin Blodgett, Gilsinia Lopez, Alexandra Olteanu, Robert Sim, Hanna Wallach
Abstract
Auditing NLP systems for computational harms like surfacing stereotypes is an elusive goal. Several recent efforts have focused on benchmark datasets consisting of pairs of contrastive sentences, which are often accompanied by metrics that aggregate an NLP system’s behavior on these pairs into measurements of harms. We examine four such benchmarks constructed for two NLP tasks: language modeling and coreference resolution. We apply a measurement modeling lens—originating from the social sciences—to inventory a range of pitfalls that threaten these benchmarks’ validity as measurement models for stereotyping. We find that these benchmarks frequently lack clear articulations of what is being measured, and we highlight a range of ambiguities and unstated assumptions that affect how these benchmarks conceptualize and operationalize stereotyping.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-long.81
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1004–1015
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.81
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.81
- Cite (ACL):
- Su Lin Blodgett, Gilsinia Lopez, Alexandra Olteanu, Robert Sim, and Hanna Wallach. 2021. Stereotyping Norwegian Salmon: An Inventory of Pitfalls in Fairness Benchmark Datasets. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1004–1015, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Stereotyping Norwegian Salmon: An Inventory of Pitfalls in Fairness Benchmark Datasets (Blodgett et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2021.acl-long.81.pdf
- Data
- CrowS-Pairs, StereoSet, WinoBias