The power of machine learning systems not only promises great technical progress, but risks societ al harm. As a recent example, researchers have shown that popular word embedding algorithms exhibit stereotypical biases, such as gender bias. The widespread use of these algorithms in machine learning systems, from automated translation services to curriculum vitae scanners, can amplify stereotypes in important contexts. Although methods have been developed to measure these biases and alter word embeddings to mitigate their biased representations, there is a lack of understanding in how word embedding bias depends on the training data. In this work, we develop a technique for understanding the origins of bias in word embeddings. Given a word embedding trained on a corpus, our method identifies how perturbing the corpus will affect the bias of the resulting embedding. This can be used to trace the origins of word embedding bias back to the original training documents. Using our method, one can investigate trends in the bias of the underlying corpus and identify subsets of documents whose removal would most reduce bias. We demonstrate our techniques on both a New York Times and Wikipedia corpus and find that our influence function-based approximations are extremely accurate.
Word embeddings are compact vector representations of words learned from a training corpus, and are actively deployed in a number of domains. They not only preserve statistical relationships present in the training data, generally placing commonly co-occurring words close to each other, but they also preserve higher-order syntactic and semantic structure, capturing relationships such as : :: : and : :: : @cite_3 . However, they have been shown to also preserve problematic relationships in the training data, such as : :: : @cite_0 .
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Continuous-valued word embeddings learned by neural language models have recently been shown to capture semantic and syntactic information about words very well, setting performance records on several word similarity tasks. The best results are obtained by learning high-dimensional embeddings from very large quantities of data, which makes scalability of the training method a critical factor. We propose a simple and scalable new approach to learning word embeddings based on training log-bilinear models with noise-contrastive estimation. Our approach is simpler, faster, and produces better results than the current state-of-the-art method. We achieve results comparable to the best ones reported, which were obtained on a cluster, using four times less data and more than an order of magnitude less computing time. We also investigate several model types and find that the embeddings learned by the simpler models perform at least as well as those learned by the more complex ones. We present a novel learning method for word embeddings designed for relation classification. Our word embeddings are trained by predicting words between noun pairs using lexical relation-specific features on a large unlabeled corpus. This allows us to explicitly incorporate relation-specific information into the word embeddings. The learned word embeddings are then used to construct feature vectors for a relation classification model. On a well-established semantic relation classification task, our method significantly outperforms a baseline based on a previously introduced word embedding method, and compares favorably to previous state-of-the-art models that use syntactic information or manually constructed external resources.