Question: What will the author do about his future work?
Evidence: We created the Equity Evaluation Corpus (EEC), which consists of 8,640 sentences specifically chosen to tease out gender and race biases in natural language processing systems. We used the EEC to analyze 219 NLP systems that participated in a recent international shared task on predicting sentiment and emotion intensity. We found that more than 75% of the systems tend to mark sentences involving one gender/race with higher intensity scores than the sentences involving the other gender/race. We found such biases to be more widely prevalent for race than for gender. We also found that the bias can be different depending on the particular affect dimension involved.
We found the score differences across genders and across races to be somewhat small on average ( INLINEFORM0 , which is INLINEFORM1 of the 0 to 1 score range). However, for some systems the score differences reached as high as 0.34 (34%). What impact a consistent bias, even with an average magnitude INLINEFORM2 , might have in downstream applications merits further investigation.
We plan to extend the EEC with sentences associated with country names, professions (e.g., doctors, police officers, janitors, teachers, etc.), fields of study (e.g., arts vs. sciences), as well as races (e.g., Asian, mixed, etc.) and genders (e.g., agender, androgyne, trans, queer, etc.) not included in the current study. We can then use the corpus to examine biases across each of those variables as well. We are also interested in exploring which systems (or what techniques) accentuate inappropriate biases in the data and which systems mitigate such biases. Finally, we are interested in exploring how the quality of sentiment analysis predictions varies when applied to text produced by different demographic groups, such as people of different races, genders, and ethnicities.
The Equity Evaluation Corpus and the proposed methodology to examine bias are not meant to be comprehensive. However, using several approaches and datasets such as the one proposed here can bring about a more thorough examination of inappropriate biases in modern machine learning systems.
We plan to extend the EEC with sentences associated with country names, professions (e.g., doctors, police officers, janitors, teachers, etc.), fields of study (e.g., arts vs. sciences), as well as races (e.g., Asian, mixed, etc.) and genders (e.g., agender, androgyne, trans, queer, etc.) not included in the current study. We can then use the corpus to examine biases across each of those variables as well. We are also interested in exploring which systems (or what techniques) accentuate inappropriate biases in the data and which systems mitigate such biases. Finally, we are interested in exploring how the quality of sentiment analysis predictions varies when applied to text produced by different demographic groups, such as people of different races, genders, and ethnicities.
Answer: They plan to extend the EEC with sentences associated with country names, professions, fields of study, as well as races and genders not included in the current study.They are also interested in exploring which systems accentuate inappropriate biases in the data and which systems mitigate such biases. Finally, they are interested in exploring how the quality of sentiment analysis predictions varies when applied to text produced by different demographic groups.