FineDeb: A Debiasing Framework for Language Models
This addresses bias in language models used in human-facing tools, but it is incremental as it builds on existing debiasing techniques.
The authors tackled bias against demographic subgroups in language models by proposing FineDeb, a two-phase debiasing framework that combines contextual debiasing of embeddings with fine-tuning, resulting in stronger debiasing compared to other methods that often leave models as biased as the original.
As language models are increasingly included in human-facing machine learning tools, bias against demographic subgroups has gained attention. We propose FineDeb, a two-phase debiasing framework for language models that starts with contextual debiasing of embeddings learned by pretrained language models. The model is then fine-tuned on a language modeling objective. Our results show that FineDeb offers stronger debiasing in comparison to other methods which often result in models as biased as the original language model. Our framework is generalizable for demographics with multiple classes, and we demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments and comparisons with state of the art techniques. We release our code and data on GitHub.