Abstract: It has been shown that word embeddings derived from large corpora tend to incorporate biases present in their training data. Various methods for mitigating these biases have been proposed, but recent work has demonstrated that these methods hide but fail to truly remove the biases, which can still be observed in word nearest-neighbor statistics. In this work we propose a probabilistic view of word embedding bias. We leverage this framework to present a novel method for mitigating bias which relies on probabilistic observations to yield a more robust bias mitigation algorithm. We demonstrate that this method effectively reduces bias according to three separate measures of bias while maintaining embedding quality across various popular benchmark semantic tasks

Introduction: Word embeddings, or vector representations of words, are an important component of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models and necessary for many downstream tasks. However, word embeddings, including embeddings commonly deployed for public use, have been shown to exhibit unwanted societal stereotypes and biases, raising concerns about disparate impact on axes of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion BIBREF0, BIBREF1. The impact of this bias has manifested in a range of downstream tasks, ranging from autocomplete suggestions BIBREF2 to advertisement delivery BIBREF3, increasing the likelihood of amplifying harmful biases through the use of these models. The most well-established method thus far for mitigating bias relies on projecting target words onto a bias subspace (such as a gender subspace) and subtracting out the difference between the resulting distances BIBREF0. On the other hand, the most popular metric for measuring bias is the WEAT statistic BIBREF1, which compares the cosine similarities between groups of words. However, WEAT has been recently shown to overestimate bias as a result of implicitly relying on similar frequencies for the target words BIBREF4, and BIBREF5 demonstrated that evidence of bias can still be recovered after geometric bias mitigation by examining the neighborhood of a target word among socially-biased words. In response to this, we propose an alternative framework for bias mitigation in word embeddings that approaches this problem from a probabilistic perspective. The motivation for this approach is two-fold. First, most popular word embedding algorithms are probabilistic at their core – i.e., they are trained (explicitly or implicitly BIBREF6) to minimize some form of word co-occurrence probabilities. Thus, we argue that a framework for measuring and treating bias in these embeddings should take into account, in addition to their geometric aspect, their probabilistic nature too. On the other hand, the issue of bias has also been approached (albeit in different contexts) in the fairness literature, where various intuitive notions of equity such as equalized odds have been formalized through probabilistic criteria. By considering analogous criteria for the word embedding setting, we seek to draw connections between these two bodies of work. We present experiments on various bias mitigation benchmarks and show that our framework is comparable to state-of-the-art alternatives according to measures of geometric bias mitigation and that it performs far better according to measures of neighborhood bias. For fair comparison, we focus on mitigating a binary gender bias in pre-trained word embeddings using SGNS (skip-gram with negative-sampling), though we note that this framework and methods could be extended to other types of bias and word embedding algorithms.

Question: What are the three measures of bias which are reduced in experiments?
Answer: RIPA, Neighborhood Metric, WEAT