Neural language models are known to have a high capacity for memorization of training samples. This may have serious privacy im- plications when training models on user content such as email correspondence. Differential privacy (DP), a popular choice to train models with privacy guarantees, comes with significant costs in terms of utility degradation and disparate impact on subgroups of users. In this work, we introduce two privacy-preserving regularization methods for training language models that enable joint optimization of utility and privacy through (1) the use of a discriminator and (2) the inclusion of a novel triplet-loss term. We compare our methods with DP through extensive evaluation. We show the advantages of our regularizers with favorable utility-privacy trade-off, faster training with the ability to tap into existing optimization approaches, and ensuring uniform treatment of under-represented subgroups.

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.

We show that leveraging metadata information from web pages can improve the performance of models for answer passage selection/reranking. We propose a neural passage selection model that leverages metadata information with a fine-grained encoding strategy, which learns the representation for metadata predicates in a hierarchical way. The models are evaluated on the MS MARCO (Nguyen et al., 2016) and Recipe-MARCO datasets. Results show that our models significantly outperform baseline models, which do not incorporate metadata. We also show that the fine-grained encoding’s advantage over other strategies for encoding the metadata.