Automatic machine learning systems can inadvertently accentuate and perpetuate inappropriate human biases. Past work on examining inappropriate biases has largely focused on just individual systems. Further, there is no benchmark dataset for examining inappropriate biases in systems. Here for the first time, we present the Equity Evaluation Corpus (EEC), which consists of 8,640 English sentences carefully chosen to tease out biases towards certain races and genders. We use the dataset to examine 219 automatic sentiment analysis systems that took part in a recent shared task, SemEval-2018 Task 1 'Affect in Tweets'. We find that several of the systems show statistically significant bias; that is, they consistently provide slightly higher sentiment intensity predictions for one race or one gender. We make the EEC freely available.
Recent studies have demonstrated that the systems trained on the human-written texts learn human-like biases @cite_18 @cite_17 . In general, any predictive model built on historical data may inadvertently inherit human biases based on gender, ethnicity, race, or religion @cite_8 @cite_11 . Discrimination-aware data mining focuses on measuring discrimination in data as well as on evaluating performance of discrimination-aware predictive models @cite_24 @cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_25 .
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_17 @cite_24 @cite_25 @cite_11
2950018712 2095932468 2147427185 2893425640 1904875463 2473695717 1648303880
The blind application of machine learning runs the risk of amplifying biases present in data. Such a danger is facing us with word embedding, a popular framework to represent text data as vectors which has been used in many machine learning and natural language processing tasks. We show that even word embeddings trained on Google News articles exhibit female male gender stereotypes to a disturbing extent. This raises concerns because their widespread use, as we describe, often tends to amplify these biases. Geometrically, gender bias is first shown to be captured by a direction in the word embedding. Second, gender neutral words are shown to be linearly separable from gender definition words in the word embedding. Using these properties, we provide a methodology for modifying an embedding to remove gender stereotypes, such as the association between between the words receptionist and female, while maintaining desired associations such as between the words queen and female. We define metrics to quantify both direct and indirect gender biases in embeddings, and develop algorithms to "debias" the embedding. Using crowd-worker evaluation as well as standard benchmarks, we empirically demonstrate that our algorithms significantly reduce gender bias in embeddings while preserving the its useful properties such as the ability to cluster related concepts and to solve analogy tasks. The resulting embeddings can be used in applications without amplifying gender bias. A Google search for a person's name, such as “Trevon Jones”, may yield a personalized ad for public records about Trevon that may be neutral, such as “Looking for Trevon Jones? …”, or may be suggestive of an arrest record, such as “Trevon Jones, Arrested?...”. This writing investigates the delivery of these kinds of ads by Google AdSense using a sample of racially associated names and finds statistically significant discrimination in ad delivery based on searches of 2184 racially associated personal names across two websites. First names, previously identified by others as being assigned at birth to more black or white babies, are found predictive of race (88 black, 96 white), and those assigned primarily to black babies, such as DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine, generated ads suggestive of an arrest in 81 to 86 percent of name searches on one website and 92 to 95 percent on the other, while those assigned at birth primarily to whites, such as Geoffrey, Jill and Emma, generated more neutral copy: the word "arrest" appeared in 23 to 29 percent of name searches on one site and 0 to 60 percent on the other. On the more ad trafficked website, a black-identifying name was 25 more likely to get an ad suggestive of an arrest record. A few names did not follow these patterns: Dustin, a name predominantly given to white babies, generated an ad suggestive of arrest 81 and 100 percent of the time. All ads return results for actual individuals and ads appear regardless of whether the name has an arrest record in the company’s database. Notwithstanding these findings, the company maintains Google received the same ad text for groups of last names (not first names), raising questions as to whether Google's advertising technology exposes racial bias in society and how ad and search technology can develop to assure racial fairness. Data mining is an increasingly important technology for extracting useful knowledge hidden in large collections of data. There are, however, negative social perceptions about data mining, among which potential privacy invasion and potential discrimination. The latter consists of unfairly treating people on the basis of their belonging to a specific group. Automated data collection and data mining techniques such as classification rule mining have paved the way to making automated decisions, like loan granting denial, insurance premium computation, etc. If the training data sets are biased in what regards discriminatory (sensitive) attributes like gender, race, religion, etc., discriminatory decisions may ensue. For this reason, anti-discrimination techniques including discrimination discovery and prevention have been introduced in data mining. Discrimination can be either direct or indirect. Direct discrimination occurs when decisions are made based on sensitive attributes. Indirect discrimination occurs when decisions are made based on nonsensitive attributes which are strongly correlated with biased sensitive ones. In this paper, we tackle discrimination prevention in data mining and propose new techniques applicable for direct or indirect discrimination prevention individually or both at the same time. We discuss how to clean training data sets and outsourced data sets in such a way that direct and or indirect discriminatory decision rules are converted to legitimate (nondiscriminatory) classification rules. We also propose new metrics to evaluate the utility of the proposed approaches and we compare these approaches. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed techniques are effective at removing direct and or indirect discrimination biases in the original data set while preserving data quality. Machine learning is a means to derive artificial intelligence by discovering patterns in existing data. Here, we show that applying machine learning to ordinary human language results in human-like semantic biases. We replicated a spectrum of known biases, as measured by the Implicit Association Test, using a widely used, purely statistical machine-learning model trained on a standard corpus of text from the World Wide Web. Our results indicate that text corpora contain recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether morally neutral as toward insects or flowers, problematic as toward race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. Our methods hold promise for identifying and addressing sources of bias in culture, including technology. Nowadays, many decisions are made using predictive models built on historical data.Predictive models may systematically discriminate groups of people even if the computing process is fair and well-intentioned. Discrimination-aware data mining studies how to make predictive models free from discrimination, when historical data, on which they are built, may be biased, incomplete, or even contain past discriminatory decisions. Discrimination refers to disadvantageous treatment of a person based on belonging to a category rather than on individual merit. In this survey we review and organize various discrimination measures that have been used for measuring discrimination in data, as well as in evaluating performance of discrimination-aware predictive models. We also discuss related measures from other disciplines, which have not been used for measuring discrimination, but potentially could be suitable for this purpose. We computationally analyze properties of selected measures. We also review and discuss measuring procedures, and present recommendations for practitioners. The primary target audience is data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, statistical modeling researchers developing new methods for non-discriminatory predictive modeling. In addition, practitioners and policy makers would use the survey for diagnosing potential discrimination by predictive models. The goal of minimizing misclassification error on a training set is often just one of several real-world goals that might be defined on different datasets. For example, one may require a classifier to also make positive predictions at some specified rate for some subpopulation (fairness), or to achieve a specified empirical recall. Other real-world goals include reducing churn with respect to a previously deployed model, or stabilizing online training. In this paper we propose handling multiple goals on multiple datasets by training with dataset constraints, using the ramp penalty to accurately quantify costs, and present an efficient algorithm to approximately optimize the resulting non-convex constrained optimization problem. Experiments on both benchmark and real-world industry datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. To partly address people’s concerns over web tracking, Google has created the Ad Settings webpage to provide information about and some choice over the profiles Google creates on users. We present AdFisher, an automated tool that explores how user behaviors, Google’s ads, and Ad Settings interact. Our tool uses a rigorous experimental design and analysis to ensure the statistical significance of our results. It uses machine learning to automate the selection of a statistical test. We use AdFisher to find that Ad Settings is opaque about some features of a user’s profile, that it does provide some choice on ads, and that these choices can lead to seemingly discriminatory ads. In particular, we found that visiting webpages associated with substance abuse will change the ads shown but not the settings page. We also found that setting the gender to female results in getting fewer instances of an ad related to high paying jobs than setting it to male.