Question: What does the statistically significant bias mean?
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Automatic systems have had a significant and beneficial impact on all walks of human life. So much so that it is easy to overlook their potential to benefit society by promoting equity, diversity, and fairness. For example, machines do not take bribes to do their jobs, they can determine eligibility for a loan without being influenced by the color of the applicant's skin, and they can provide access to information and services without discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation. Nonetheless, as machine learning systems become more human-like in their predictions, they can also perpetuate human biases. Some learned biases may be beneficial for the downstream application (e.g., learning that humans often use some insect names, such as spider or cockroach, to refer to unpleasant situations). Other biases can be inappropriate and result in negative experiences for some groups of people. Examples include, loan eligibility and crime recidivism prediction systems that negatively assess people belonging to a certain pin/zip code (which may disproportionately impact people of a certain race) BIBREF0 and resumé sorting systems that believe that men are more qualified to be programmers than women BIBREF1 . Similarly, sentiment and emotion analysis systems can also perpetuate and accentuate inappropriate human biases, e.g., systems that consider utterances from one race or gender to be less positive simply because of their race or gender, or customer support systems that prioritize a call from an angry male over a call from the equally angry female.
Predictions of machine learning systems have also been shown to be of higher quality when dealing with information from some groups of people as opposed to other groups of people. For example, in the area of computer vision, gender classification systems perform particularly poorly for darker skinned females BIBREF2 . Natural language processing (NLP) systems have been shown to be poor in understanding text produced by people belonging to certain races BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 . For NLP systems, the sources of the bias often include the training data, other corpora, lexicons, and word embeddings that the machine learning algorithm may leverage to build its prediction model.
Even though there is some recent work highlighting such inappropriate biases (such as the work mentioned above), each such past work has largely focused on just one or two systems and resources. Further, there is no benchmark dataset for examining inappropriate biases in natural language systems. In this paper, we describe how we compiled a dataset of 8,640 English sentences carefully chosen to tease out biases towards certain races and genders. We will refer to it as the Equity Evaluation Corpus (EEC). We used the EEC as a supplementary test set in a recent shared task on predicting sentiment and emotion intensity in tweets, SemEval-2018 Task 1: Affect in Tweets BIBREF5 . In particular, we wanted to test a hypothesis that a system should equally rate the intensity of the emotion expressed by two sentences that differ only in the gender/race of a person mentioned. Note that here the term system refers to the combination of a machine learning architecture trained on a labeled dataset, and possibly using additional language resources. The bias can originate from any or several of these parts. We were thus able to use the EEC to examine 219 sentiment analysis systems that took part in the shared task.
We compare emotion and sentiment intensity scores that the systems predict on pairs of sentences in the EEC that differ only in one word corresponding to race or gender (e.g., `This man made me feel angry' vs. `This woman made me feel angry'). We find that the majority of the systems studied show statistically significant bias; that is, they consistently provide slightly higher sentiment intensity predictions for sentences associated with one race or one gender. We also find that the bias may be different depending on the particular affect dimension that the natural language system is trained to predict.
Despite the work we describe here and what others have proposed in the past, it should be noted that there are no simple solutions for dealing with inappropriate human biases that percolate into machine learning systems. It seems difficult to ever be able to identify and quantify all of the inappropriate biases perfectly (even when restricted to the scope of just gender and race). Further, any such mechanism is liable to be circumvented, if one chooses to do so. Nonetheless, as developers of sentiment analysis systems, and NLP systems more broadly, we cannot absolve ourselves of the ethical implications of the systems we build. Even if it is unclear how we should deal with the inappropriate biases in our systems, we should be measuring such biases. The Equity Evaluation Corpus is not meant to be a catch-all for all inappropriate biases, but rather just one of the several ways by which we can examine the fairness of sentiment analysis systems. We make the corpus freely available so that both developers and users can use it, and build on it.
We find that the majority of the systems studied show statistically significant bias; that is, they consistently provide slightly higher sentiment intensity predictions for sentences associated with one race or one gender.
Answer: That is, they consistently provide slightly higher sentiment intensity predictions for sentences associated with one race or one gender.