Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the understanding and use of phrases, the stances are cohesive within the particular groups. However, such cohesiveness does not hold across groups. In collaborative environments or environments where impartial language is desired (e.g. Wikipedia, news media), statements and the language therein should represent equally the involved parties and be neutrally phrased. Biased language is introduced through the presence of inflammatory words or phrases, or statements that may be incorrect or one-sided, thus violating such consensus. In this work, we focus on the specific case of phrasing bias, which may be introduced through specific inflammatory words or phrases in a statement. For this purpose, we propose an approach that relies on a recurrent neural networks in order to capture the inter-dependencies between words in a phrase that introduced bias. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation, where we show the advantages of a neural based approach over competitors that rely on word lexicons and other hand-crafted features in detecting biased language. We are able to distinguish biased statements with a precision of P=0.917, thus significantly outperforming baseline models with an improvement of over 30 . Finally, we release the largest corpus of statements annotated for biased language.
An additional competitor to our work is the work by Hube and Fetahu @cite_11 . Their task is similar to ours, where they gather biased statements from Wikipedia by extracting statements from the right-wing conservative wiki Conservapedia http: www.conservapedia.com . Their approach extends on the work of @cite_4 by introducing features that take into account the context of certain words from lexicons, and additionally including features based on the LIWC text analysis tool @cite_6 . The approach is supervised and one of their best features is a biased word list they construct by identifying bias word clusters in the Wikipedia word2vec word embedding space. We compare against this work, and show that long-range dependencies between words and phrases in a statement are hard to capture through hand-crafted features.
@cite_4 @cite_6 @cite_11
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We introduce a new benchmark, WinoBias, for coreference resolution focused on gender bias. Our corpus contains Winograd-schema style sentences with entities corresponding to people referred by their occupation (e.g. the nurse, the doctor, the carpenter). We demonstrate that a rule-based, a feature-rich, and a neural coreference system all link gendered pronouns to pro-stereotypical entities with higher accuracy than anti-stereotypical entities, by an average difference of 21.1 in F1 score. Finally, we demonstrate a data-augmentation approach that, in combination with existing word-embedding debiasing techniques, removes the bias demonstrated by these systems in WinoBias without significantly affecting their performance on existing coreference benchmark datasets. Our dataset and code are available at this http URL Quality in Wikipedia is enforced through a set of editing policies and guidelines recommended for Wikipedia editors. Neutral point of view (NPOV) is one of the main principles in Wikipedia, which ensures that for controversial information all possible points of view are represented proportionally. Furthermore, language used in Wikipedia should be neutral and not opinionated. However, due to the large number of Wikipedia articles and its operating principle based on a voluntary basis of Wikipedia editors; quality assurances and Wikipedia guidelines cannot always be enforced. Currently, there are more than 40,000 articles, which are flagged with NPOV or similar quality tags. Furthermore, these represent only the portion of articles for which such quality issues are explicitly flagged by the Wikipedia editors, however, the real number may be higher considering that only a small percentage of articles are of good quality or featured as categorized by Wikipedia. In this work, we focus on the case of language bias at the sentence level in Wikipedia. Language bias is a hard problem, as it represents a subjective task and usually the linguistic cues are subtle and can be determined only through its context. We propose a supervised classification approach, which relies on an automatically created lexicon of bias words, and other syntactical and semantic characteristics of biased statements. We experimentally evaluate our approach on a dataset consisting of biased and unbiased statements, and show that we are able to detect biased statements with an accuracy of 74 . Furthermore, we show that competitors that determine bias words are not suitable for detecting biased statements, which we outperform with a relative improvement of over 20 . Algorithms for data-driven learning of domain-specific overcomplete dictionaries are developed to obtain maximum likelihood and maximum a posteriori dictionary estimates based on the use of Bayesian models with concave Schur-concave (CSC) negative log priors. Such priors are appropriate for obtaining sparse representations of environmental signals within an appropriately chosen (environmentally matched) dictionary. The elements of the dictionary can be interpreted as concepts, features, or words capable of succinct expression of events encountered in the environment (the source of the measured signals). This is a generalization of vector quantization in that one is interested in a description involving a few dictionary entries (the proverbial "25 words or less"), but not necessarily as succinct as one entry. To learn an environmentally adapted dictionary capable of concise expression of signals generated by the environment, we develop algorithms that iterate between a representative set of sparse representations found by variants of FOCUSS and an update of the dictionary using these sparse representations.Experiments were performed using synthetic data and natural images. For complete dictionaries, we demonstrate that our algorithms have improved performance over other independent component analysis (ICA) methods, measured in terms of signal-to-noise ratios of separated sources. In the overcomplete case, we show that the true underlying dictionary and sparse sources can be accurately recovered. In tests with natural images, learned overcomplete dictionaries are shown to have higher coding efficiency than complete dictionaries; that is, images encoded with an overcomplete dictionary have both higher compression (fewer bits per pixel) and higher accuracy (lower mean square error). Traditional fact checking by experts and analysts cannot keep pace with the volume of newly created information. It is important and necessary, therefore, to enhance our ability to computationally determine whether some statement of fact is true or false. We view this problem as a link-prediction task in a knowledge graph, and present a discriminative path-based method for fact checking in knowledge graphs that incorporates connectivity, type information, and predicate interactions. Given a statement S of the form (subject, predicate, object), for example, (Chicago, capitalOf, Illinois), our approach mines discriminative paths that alternatively define the generalized statement (U.S. city, predicate, U.S. state) and uses the mined rules to evaluate the veracity of statement S . We evaluate our approach by examining thousands of claims related to history, geography, biology, and politics using a public, million node knowledge graph extracted from Wikipedia and PubMedDB. Not only does our approach significantly outperform related models, we also find that the discriminative predicate path model is easily interpretable and provides sensible reasons for the final determination.