HateDebias: On the Diversity and Variability of Hate Speech Debiasing
This work addresses bias in hate speech detection for social media platforms, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The authors tackled the problem of bias in hate speech detection by creating a benchmark dataset, HateDebias, that captures diverse and evolving biases, and they proposed a continual debiasing framework that improved performance in mitigating dynamic biases in real-world scenarios.
Hate speech frequently appears on social media platforms and urgently needs to be effectively controlled. Alleviating the bias caused by hate speech can help resolve various ethical issues. Although existing research has constructed several datasets for hate speech detection, these datasets seldom consider the diversity and variability of bias, making them far from real-world scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose a benchmark HateDebias to analyze the fairness of models under dynamically evolving environments. Specifically, to meet the diversity of biases, we collect hate speech data with different types of biases from real-world scenarios. To further simulate the variability in the real-world scenarios(i.e., the changing of bias attributes in datasets), we construct a dataset to follow the continuous learning setting and evaluate the detection accuracy of models on the HateDebias, where performance degradation indicates a significant bias toward a specific attribute. To provide a potential direction, we further propose a continual debiasing framework tailored to dynamic bias in real-world scenarios, integrating memory replay and bias information regularization to ensure the fairness of the model. Experiment results on the HateDebias benchmark reveal that our methods achieve improved performance in mitigating dynamic biases in real-world scenarios, highlighting the practicality in real-world applications.