Counterfactual Probing for the Influence of Affect and Specificity on Intergroup Bias
Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan, David Beaver, Kyle Mahowald, Junyi Jessy Li
Abstract
While existing work on studying bias in NLP focues on negative or pejorative language use, Govindarajan et al. (2023) offer a revised framing of bias in terms of intergroup social context, and its effects on language behavior. In this paper, we investigate if two pragmatic features (specificity and affect) systematically vary in different intergroup contexts — thus connecting this new framing of bias to language output. Preliminary analysis finds modest correlations between specificity and affect of tweets with supervised intergroup relationship (IGR) labels. Counterfactual probing further reveals that while neural models finetuned for predicting IGR reliably use affect in classification, the model’s usage of specificity is inconclusive.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-acl.813
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 12853–12862
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.813
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.813
- Cite (ACL):
- Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan, David Beaver, Kyle Mahowald, and Junyi Jessy Li. 2023. Counterfactual Probing for the Influence of Affect and Specificity on Intergroup Bias. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 12853–12862, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Counterfactual Probing for the Influence of Affect and Specificity on Intergroup Bias (Govindarajan et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2023.findings-acl.813.pdf