Fairness

Classist Tools: Social Class Correlates with Performance in NLP

Since the foundational work of William Labov on the social stratification of language (Labov, 1964), linguistics has made concentrated efforts to explore the links between sociodemographic characteristics and language production and perception. But …

Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP

Since Labov's (1964) foundational work on the social stratification of language, linguistics has dedicated concerted efforts towards understanding the relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production and perception. Despite the …

A Multi-dimensional study on Bias in Vision-Language models

In recent years, joint Vision-Language (VL) models have increased in popularity and capability. Very few studies have attempted to investigate bias in VL models, even though it is a well-known issue in both individual modalities.This paper presents …

What about ''em''? How Commercial Machine Translation Fails to Handle (Neo-)Pronouns

As 3rd-person pronoun usage shifts to include novel forms, e.g., neopronouns, we need more research on identity-inclusive NLP. Exclusion is particularly harmful in one of the most popular NLP applications, machine translation (MT). Wrong pronoun …

What about ''em''? How Commercial Machine Translation Fails to Handle (Neo-)Pronouns

As 3rd-person pronoun usage shifts to include novel forms, e.g., neopronouns, we need more research on identity-inclusive NLP. Exclusion is particularly harmful in one of the most popular NLP applications, machine translation (MT). Wrong pronoun …

Easily Accessible Text-to-Image Generation Amplifies Demographic Stereotypes at Large Scale

Machine learning models are now able to convert user-written text descriptions into naturalistic images. These models are available to anyone online and are being used to generate millions of images a day. We investigate these models and find that …

Bridging Fairness and Environmental Sustainability in Natural Language Processing

Fairness and environmental impact are important research directions for the sustainable development of artificial intelligence. However, while each topic is an active research area in natural language processing (NLP), there is a surprising lack of …

Welcome to the Modern World of Pronouns: Identity-Inclusive Natural Language Processing beyond Gender

The world of pronouns is changing – from a closed word class with few members to an open set of terms to reflect identities. However, Natural Language Processing (NLP) barely reflects this linguistic shift, resulting in the possible exclusion of …

Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design

Over the last several years, end-to-end neural conversational agents have vastly improved their ability to carry unrestricted, open-domain conversations with humans. However, these models are often trained on large datasets from the Internet and, as …

Fair and Argumentative Language Modeling for Computational Argumentation

Although much work in NLP has focused on measuring and mitigating stereotypical bias in semantic spaces, research addressing bias in computational argumentation is still in its infancy. In this paper, we address this research gap and conduct a …