Debiasing Gender Bias in Information Retrieval Models
This addresses the problem of propagating gender stereotypes in information retrieval for users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing debiasing and adapter network methods.
The paper tackled gender bias in information retrieval models by showing that pre-trained models perform poorly in zero-shot tasks and exhibit biases favoring male documents, and introduced a debiasing technique that improved zero-shot retrieval performance by almost 20% over baseline and balanced retrieval across genders.
Biases in culture, gender, ethnicity, etc. have existed for decades and have affected many areas of human social interaction. These biases have been shown to impact machine learning (ML) models, and for natural language processing (NLP), this can have severe consequences for downstream tasks. Mitigating gender bias in information retrieval (IR) is important to avoid propagating stereotypes. In this work, we employ a dataset consisting of two components: (1) relevance of a document to a query and (2) "gender" of a document, in which pronouns are replaced by male, female, and neutral conjugations. We definitively show that pre-trained models for IR do not perform well in zero-shot retrieval tasks when full fine-tuning of a large pre-trained BERT encoder is performed and that lightweight fine-tuning performed with adapter networks improves zero-shot retrieval performance almost by 20% over baseline. We also illustrate that pre-trained models have gender biases that result in retrieved articles tending to be more often male than female. We overcome this by introducing a debiasing technique that penalizes the model when it prefers males over females, resulting in an effective model that retrieves articles in a balanced fashion across genders.