Neutralizing gender bias in word embeddings with latent disentanglement and counterfactual generation

Seungjae Shin, Kyungwoo Song, Joon Ho Jang, Hyemi Kim, Weonyoung Joo, Il Chul Moon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent research demonstrates that word embeddings, trained on the human-generated corpus, have strong gender biases in embedding spaces, and these biases can result in the discriminative results from the various downstream tasks. Whereas the previous methods project word embeddings into a linear subspace for debiasing, we introduce a Latent Disentanglement method with a siamese autoencoder structure with an adapted gradient reversal layer. Our structure enables the separation of the semantic latent information and gender latent information of given word into the disjoint latent dimensions. Afterwards, we introduce a Counterfactual Generation to convert the gender information of words, so the original and the modified embeddings can produce a gender-neutralized word embedding after geometric alignment regularization, without loss of semantic information. From the various quantitative and qualitative debiasing experiments, our method shows to be better than existing debiasing methods in debiasing word embeddings. In addition, Our method shows the ability to preserve semantic information during debiasing by minimizing the semantic information losses for extrinsic NLP downstream tasks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Findings of ACL
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2020
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3126-3140
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148903
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
EventFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020: EMNLP 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 16 Nov 202020 Nov 2020

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2020

Conference

ConferenceFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020: EMNLP 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period16/11/2020/11/20

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2018R1C1B6008652)

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics

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