Deepak John Reji

Shaina Raza, Muskan Garg, Deepak John Reji et al.

Bias in textual data can lead to skewed interpretations and outcomes when the data is used. These biases could perpetuate stereotypes, discrimination, or other forms of unfair treatment. An algorithm trained on biased data may end up making decisions that disproportionately impact a certain group of people. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and remove these biases to ensure the fair and ethical use of data. To this end, we develop a comprehensive and robust framework NBIAS that consists of four main layers: data, corpus construction, model development and an evaluation layer. The dataset is constructed by collecting diverse data from various domains, including social media, healthcare, and job hiring portals. As such, we applied a transformer-based token classification model that is able to identify bias words/ phrases through a unique named entity BIAS. In the evaluation procedure, we incorporate a blend of quantitative and qualitative measures to gauge the effectiveness of our models. We achieve accuracy improvements ranging from 1% to 8% compared to baselines. We are also able to generate a robust understanding of the model functioning. The proposed approach is applicable to a variety of biases and contributes to the fair and ethical use of textual data.

Deepak John Reji

This paper introduces discourse_simulator, an open-source framework that combines LLMs with agent-based modelling. It offers a new way to simulate how public attitudes toward immigration change over time in response to salient events like protests, controversies, or policy debates. Large language models (LLMs) are used to generate social media posts, interpret opinions, and model how ideas spread through social networks. Unlike traditional agent-based models that rely on fixed, rule-based opinion updates and cannot generate natural language or consider current events, this approach integrates multidimensional sociological belief structures and real-world event timelines. This framework is wrapped into an open-source Python package that integrates generative agents into a small-world network topology and a live news retrieval system. discourse_sim is purpose-built as a social science research instrument specifically for studying attitude dynamics, polarisation, and belief evolution following real-world critical events. Unlike other LLM Agent Swarm frameworks, which treat the simulations as a prediction black box, discourse_sim treats it as a theory-testing instrument, which is fundamentally a different epistemological stance for studying social science problems. The paper further demonstrates the framework by modelling the Dublin anti-immigration march on April 26, 2025, with N=100 agents over a 15-day simulation. Package link: https://pypi.org/project/discourse-sim/

Shaina Raza, Deepak John Reji, Dora D. Liu et al.

Recommender systems, information retrieval, and other information access systems present unique challenges for examining and applying concepts of fairness and bias mitigation in unstructured text. This paper introduces Dbias, which is a Python package to ensure fairness in news articles. Dbias is a trained Machine Learning (ML) pipeline that can take a text (e.g., a paragraph or news story) and detects if the text is biased or not. Then, it detects the biased words in the text, masks them, and recommends a set of sentences with new words that are bias-free or at least less biased. We incorporate the elements of data science best practices to ensure that this pipeline is reproducible and usable. We show in experiments that this pipeline can be effective for mitigating biases and outperforms the common neural network architectures in ensuring fairness in the news articles.

Shaina Raza, Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Shardul Ghuge et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as text generation and translation, among others. However, these models often generate texts that can perpetuate biases. Existing approaches to mitigate these biases usually compromise knowledge retention. This study explores whether LLMs can produce safe, unbiased outputs without sacrificing knowledge or comprehension. We introduce the Safe and Responsible Large Language Model (\textbf{SR}$_{\text{LLM}}$), which has been instruction fine-tuned atop of a safe fine-tuned auto-regressive decoder-only LLM to reduce biases in generated texts. We developed a specialized dataset with examples of unsafe and corresponding safe variations to train \textbf{SR}$_{\text{LLM}}$ to identify and correct biased text. Experiments on our specialized dataset and out-of-distribution test sets reveal that \textbf{SR}$_{\text{LLM}}$ effectively reduces biases while preserving knowledge integrity. This performance surpasses that of traditional fine-tuning of smaller language models and base LLMs that merely reply on prompting techniques. Our findings demonstrate that instruction fine-tuning on custom datasets tailored for tasks such as debiasing is a highly effective strategy for minimizing bias in LLM while preserving their inherent knowledge and capabilities. The code and dataset are accessible at \href{https://github.com/shainarazavi/Safe-Responsible-LLM}{SR-LLM}