It has been shown that knowledge graph embeddings encode potentially harmful social biases, such as the information that women are more likely to be nurses, and men more likely to be bankers. As graph embeddings begin to be used more widely in NLP pipelines, there is a need to develop training methods which remove such biases. Previous approaches to this problem both significantly increase the training time, by a factor of eight or more, and decrease the accuracy of the model substantially. We present a novel approach, in which all embeddings are trained to be neutral to sensitive attributes such as gender by default using an adversarial loss. We then add sensitive attributes back on in whitelisted cases. Training time only marginally increases over a baseline model, and the debiased embeddings perform almost as accurately in the triple prediction task as their non-debiased counterparts.

Named entity recognition (NER) is one of the best studied tasks in natural language processing. However, most approaches are not capable of handling nested structures which are common in many applications. In this paper we introduce a novel neural network architecture that first merges tokens and/or entities into entities forming nested structures, and then labels each of them independently. Unlike previous work, our merge and label approach predicts real-valued instead of discrete segmentation structures, which allow it to combine word and nested entity embeddings while maintaining differentiability. We evaluate our approach using the ACE 2005 Corpus, where it achieves state-of-the-art F1 of 74.6, further improved with contextual embeddings (BERT) to 82.4, an overall improvement of close to 8 F1 points over previous approaches trained on the same data. Additionally we compare it against BiLSTM-CRFs, the dominant approach for flat NER structures, demonstrating that its ability to predict nested structures does not impact performance in simpler cases.