Technologies for abusive language detection are being developed and applied with little consideration of their potential biases. We examine racial bias in five different sets of Twitter data annotated for hate speech and abusive language. We train classifiers on these datasets and compare the predictions of these classifiers on tweets written in African-American English with those written in Standard American English. The results show evidence of systematic racial bias in all datasets, as classifiers trained on them tend to predict that tweets written in African-American English are abusive at substantially higher rates. If these abusive language detection systems are used in the field they will therefore have a disproportionate negative impact on African-American social media users. Consequently, these systems may discriminate against the groups who are often the targets of the abuse we are trying to detect.
Scholars and practitioners have recently been devoting more attention to bias in machine learning models, particularly as these models are becoming involved in more and more consequential decisions @cite_1 . Bias often derives from the data used to train these models. For example, show how facial recognition technologies perform worse for darker-skinned people, particularly darker-skinned women, due to the disproportionate presence of white, male faces in the training data. Natural language processing systems also inherit biases from the data they were trained on. For example, in unsupervised learning, word embeddings often contain biases @cite_19 @cite_29 @cite_17 which persist even after attempts to remove them @cite_16 . There are many examples of bias in supervised learning contexts: YouTube's captioning models make more errors when transcribing women @cite_10 , AAE is more likely to be misclassified as non-English by widely used language classifiers @cite_11 , numerous gender and racial biases exist in sentiment classification systems @cite_8 , and errors in both co-reference resolution systems and occupational classification models reflect gendered occupational patterns @cite_6 @cite_32 .
@cite_11 @cite_8 @cite_29 @cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_19 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_17
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When analysing human activities using data mining or machine learning techniques, it can be useful to infer properties such as the gender or age of the people involved. This paper focuses on the sub-problem of gender recognition, which has been studied extensively in the literature, with two main problems remaining unsolved: how to improve the accuracy on real-world face images, and how to generalise the models to perform well on new datasets. We address these problems by collecting five million weakly labelled face images, and performing three different experiments, investigating: the performance difference between convolutional neural networks (CNNs) of differing depths and a support vector machine approach using local binary pattern features on the same training data, the effect of contextual information on classification accuracy, and the ability of convolutional neural networks and large amounts of training data to generalise to cross-database classification. We report record-breaking results on both the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 98.90 , and the Images of Groups (GROUPS) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.34 for cross-database gender classification. Machine learning bias and fairness have recently emerged as key issues due to the pervasive deployment of data-driven decision making in a variety of sectors and services. It has often been argued that unfair classifications can be attributed to bias in training data, but previous attempts to ‘repair’ training data have led to limited success. To circumvent shortcomings prevalent in data repairing approaches, e.g. by weighting training samples of the sensitive group (e.g. gender, race, financial status) based on their misclassification error, we present a process that iteratively adapts training sample weights with a theoretically grounded model. This model addresses different kinds of bias to better achieve fairness objectives, such as trade-offs between accuracy and disparate impact elimination or disparate mistreatment elimination. We show that, compared to previous fairness-aware approaches on real-world and synthetic datasets, our methodology achieves better or similar trades-offs between accuracy and unfairness mitigation. Neural machine translation has significantly pushed forward the quality of the field. However, there are remaining big issues with the translations and one of them is fairness. Neural models are trained on large text corpora which contains biases and stereotypes. As a consequence, models inherit these social biases. Recent methods have shown results in reducing gender bias in other natural language processing applications such as word embeddings. We take advantage of the fact that word embeddings are used in neural machine translation to propose the first debiased machine translation system. Specifically, we propose, experiment and analyze the integration of two debiasing techniques over GloVe embeddings in the Transformer translation architecture. We evaluate our proposed system on a generic English-Spanish task, showing gains up to one BLEU point. As for the gender bias evaluation, we generate a test set of occupations and we show that our proposed system learns to equalize existing biases from the baseline system. In machine learning and computer vision, input signals are often filtered to increase data discriminability. For example, preprocessing face images with Gabor band-pass filters is known to improve performance in expression recognition tasks [1]. Sometimes, however, one may wish to purposely decrease discriminability of one classification task (a “distractor” task), while simultaneously preserving information relevant to another task (the target task): For example, due to privacy concerns, it may be important to mask the identity of persons contained in face images before submitting them to a crowdsourcing site (e.g., Mechanical Turk) when labeling them for certain facial attributes. Suppressing discriminability in distractor tasks may also be needed to improve inter-dataset generalization: training datasets may sometimes contain spurious correlations between a target attribute (e.g., facial expression) and a distractor attribute (e.g., gender). We might improve generalization to new datasets by suppressing the signal related to the distractor task in the training dataset. This can be seen as a special form of supervised regularization. In this paper we present an approach to automatically learning preprocessing filters that suppress discriminability in distractor tasks while preserving it in target tasks. We present promising results in simulated image classification problems and in a realistic expression recognition problem.