Evaluating Simple Debiasing Techniques in RoBERTa-based Hate Speech Detection Models
This addresses bias in hate speech detection for users of AAE, but it is incremental as it applies existing techniques to a specific model.
The study tackled bias against African American English (AAE) in RoBERTa-based hate speech detection models by evaluating simple debiasing techniques, finding that their success depends on training dataset construction but can reduce dialect disparity with proper bias consideration.
The hate speech detection task is known to suffer from bias against African American English (AAE) dialect text, due to the annotation bias present in the underlying hate speech datasets used to train these models. This leads to a disparity where normal AAE text is more likely to be misclassified as abusive/hateful compared to non-AAE text. Simple debiasing techniques have been developed in the past to counter this sort of disparity, and in this work, we apply and evaluate these techniques in the scope of RoBERTa-based encoders. Experimental results suggest that the success of these techniques depends heavily on the methods used for training dataset construction, but with proper consideration of representation bias, they can reduce the disparity seen among dialect subgroups on the hate speech detection task.