Detecting and Reducing Bias in a High Stakes Domain

Ruiqi Zhong, Yanda Chen, Desmond Patton, Charlotte Selous, Kathy McKeown

Abstract
Gang-involved youth in cities such as Chicago sometimes post on social media to express their aggression towards rival gangs and previous research has demonstrated that a deep learning approach can predict aggression and loss in posts. To address the possibility of bias in this sensitive application, we developed an approach to systematically interpret the state of the art model. We found, surprisingly, that it frequently bases its predictions on stop words such as “a” or “on”, an approach that could harm social media users who have no aggressive intentions. To tackle this bias, domain experts annotated the rationales, highlighting words that explain why a tweet is labeled as “aggression”. These new annotations enable us to quantitatively measure how justified the model predictions are, and build models that drastically reduce bias. Our study shows that in high stake scenarios, accuracy alone cannot guarantee a good system and we need new evaluation methods.
Anthology ID:
D19-1483
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4765–4775
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1483
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1483
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruiqi Zhong, Yanda Chen, Desmond Patton, Charlotte Selous, and Kathy McKeown. 2019. Detecting and Reducing Bias in a High Stakes Domain. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4765–4775, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting and Reducing Bias in a High Stakes Domain (Zhong et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/D19-1483.pdf
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 D19-1483.Attachment.pdf
Code
 David3384/GI_2019
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