When and why does bias mitigation work?
File(s)2023.findings-emnlp.619.pdf (1.96 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Ravichander, Abhilasha
Stacey, Joe
Rei, Marek
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Neural models have been shown to exploit shallow surface features to perform language understanding tasks, rather than learning the deeper language understanding and reasoning skills that practitioners desire. Previous work has developed debiasing techniques to pressure models away from spurious features or artifacts in datasets, with the goal of having models instead learn useful, task-relevant representations. However, what do models actually learn as a result of such debiasing procedures? In this work, we evaluate three model debiasing strategies, and through a set of carefully designed tests we show how debiasing can actually increase the model’s reliance on hidden biases, instead of learning robust features that help it solve a task. Further, we demonstrate how even debiasing models against all shallow features in a dataset may still not help models address NLP tasks. As a result, we suggest that debiasing existing models may not be sufficient for many language understanding tasks, and future work should consider new learning paradigms, to address complex challenges such as commonsense reasoning and inference.
Date Issued
2023
Date Acceptance
2023-12-06
Citation
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, 2023, pp.9233-9247
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Start Page
9233
End Page
9247
Journal / Book Title
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Copyright Statement
ACL materials are Copyright © 1963–2024 ACL; other materials are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders. Materials prior to 2016 here are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Permission is granted to make copies for the purposes of teaching and research. Materials published in or after 2016 are licensed on a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.619
Source
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2023-12-06
Finish Date
2023-12-10
Coverage Spatial
Resorts World Convention Centre, Singapore
Date Publish Online
2023