Automate or Assist? The Role of Computational Models in Identifying Gendered Discourse in US Capital Trial Transcripts

The language used by US courtroom actors in criminal trials has long been studied for biases. However, systematic studies for bias in high-stakes court trials have been difficult, due to the nuanced nature of bias and the legal expertise required. New large language models offer the possibility to automate annotation, saving time and cost. But validating these approaches requires both high quantitative performance as well as an understanding of how automated methods fit in existing workflows, and what they really offer. In this paper we present a case study of adding an automated system to a complex and high-stakes problem: identifying gender-biased language in US capital trials for women defendants. Our team of experienced death-penalty lawyers and NLP technologists pursued a three-phase study: first annotating manually, then training and evaluating computational models, and finally comparing human annotations to model predictions. Unlike many typical NLP tasks, annotating for gender bias in months-long capital trials was a complicated task that involves with many individual judgment calls. In contrast to standard arguments for automation that are based on efficiency and scalability, legal experts found the computational models most useful in challenging their personal bias in annotation and providing opportunities to refine and build consensus on rules for annotation. This suggests that seeking to replace experts with computational models is both unrealistic and undesirable. Rather, computational models offer valuable opportunities to assist the legal experts in annotation-based studies.

Careless Whisper: Speech-to-Text Hallucination Harms

Speech-to-text services aim to transcribe input audio as accurately as possible. They increasingly play a role in everyday life, for example in personal voice assistants or in customer-company interactions. We evaluate Open AI's Whisper, a state-of-the-art service outperforming industry competitors. While many of Whisper's transcriptions were highly accurate, we found that roughly 1% of audio transcriptions contained entire hallucinated phrases or sentences, which did not exist in any form in the underlying audio. We thematically analyze the Whisper-hallucinated content, finding that 38% of hallucinations include explicit harms such as violence, made up personal information, or false video-based authority. We further provide hypotheses on why hallucinations occur, uncovering potential disparities due to speech type by health status. We call on industry practitioners to ameliorate these language-model-based hallucinations in Whisper, and to raise awareness of potential biases in downstream applications of speech-to-text models.

Should I Stop or Should I Go: Early Stopping with Heterogeneous Populations

Randomized experiments often need to be stopped prematurely due to the treatment having an unintended harmful effect. Existing methods that determine when to stop an experiment early are typically applied to the data in aggregate and do not account for treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we study the early stopping of experiments for harm on heterogeneous populations. We first establish that current methods often fail to stop experiments when the treatment harms a minority group of participants. We then use causal machine learning to develop CLASH, the first broadly-applicable method for heterogeneous early stopping. We demonstrate CLASH's performance on simulated and real data and show that it yields effective early stopping for both clinical trials and A/B tests.

Auditing Cross-Cultural Consistency of Human-Annotated Labels for Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems increasingly depend on massive human-labeled datasets; however, the human annotators hired to generate these labels increasingly come from homogeneous backgrounds. This poses an issue when downstream predictive models -- based on these labels -- are applied globally to a heterogeneous set of users. We study this disconnect with respect to the labels themselves, asking whether they are ``consistently conceptualized'' across annotators of different demographics. In a case study of video game labels, we conduct a survey on 5,174 gamers, identify a subset of inconsistently conceptualized game labels, perform causal analyses, and suggest both cultural and linguistic reasons for cross-country differences in label annotation. We further demonstrate that predictive models of game annotations perform better on global train sets as opposed to homogeneous (single-country) train sets. Finally, we provide a generalizable framework for practitioners to audit their own data annotation processes for consistent label conceptualization, and encourage practitioners to consider global inclusivity in recommendation systems starting from the early stages of annotator recruitment and data-labeling.

Trucks Don't Mean Trump: Diagnosing Human Error in Image Analysis

Algorithms provide powerful tools for detecting and dissecting human bias and error. Here, we develop machine learning methods to to analyze how humans err in a particular high-stakes task: image interpretation. We leverage a unique dataset of 16,135,392 human predictions of whether a neighborhood voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in the 2020 US election, based on a Google Street View image. We show that by training a machine learning estimator of the Bayes optimal decision for each image, we can provide an actionable decomposition of human error into bias, variance, and noise terms, and further identify specific features (like pickup trucks) which lead humans astray. Our methods can be applied to ensure that human-in-the-loop decision-making is accurate and fair and are also applicable to black-box algorithmic systems.

Federated Causal Inference in Heterogeneous Observational Data

Analyzing observational data from multiple sources can be useful for increasing statistical power to detect a treatment effect; however, practical constraints such as privacy considerations may restrict individual-level information sharing across data sets. This paper develops federated methods that only utilize summary-level information from heterogeneous data sets. Our federated methods provide doubly-robust point estimates of treatment effects as well as variance estimates. We derive the asymptotic distributions of our federated estimators, which are shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the corresponding estimators from the combined, individual-level data. We show that to achieve these properties, federated methods should be adjusted based on conditions such as whether models are correctly specified and stable across heterogeneous data sets.

Synthetic Data Generation for Economists

As more tech companies engage in rigorous economic analyses, we are confronted with a data problem: in-house papers cannot be replicated due to use of sensitive, proprietary, or private data. Readers are left to assume that the obscured true data (e.g., internal Google information) indeed produced the results given, or they must seek out comparable public-facing data (e.g., Google Trends) that yield similar results. One way to ameliorate this reproducibility issue is to have researchers release synthetic datasets based on their true data; this allows external parties to replicate an internal researcher's methodology. In this brief overview, we explore synthetic data generation at a high level for economic analyses.

Curriculum Learning in Deep Neural Networks for Financial Forecasting

For any financial organization, computing accurate quarterly forecasts for various products is one of the most critical operations. As the granularity at which forecasts are needed increases, traditional statistical time series models may not scale well. We apply deep neural networks in the forecasting domain by experimenting with techniques from Natural Language Processing (Encoder-Decoder LSTMs) and Computer Vision (Dilated CNNs), as well as incorporating transfer learning. A novel contribution of this paper is the application of curriculum learning to neural network models built for time series forecasting. We illustrate the performance of our models using Microsoft's revenue data corresponding to Enterprise, and Small, Medium & Corporate products, spanning approximately 60 regions across the globe for 8 different business segments, and totaling in the order of tens of billions of USD. We compare our models' performance to the ensemble model of traditional statistics and machine learning techniques currently used by Microsoft Finance. With this in-production model as a baseline, our experiments yield an approximately 30% improvement in overall accuracy on test data. We find that our curriculum learning LSTM-based model performs best, showing that it is reasonable to implement our proposed methods without overfitting on medium-sized data.

Learning Twitter User Sentiments on Climate Change with Limited Labeled Data

While it is well-documented that climate change accepters and deniers have become increasingly polarized in the United States over time, there has been no large-scale examination of whether these individuals are prone to changing their opinions as a result of natural external occurrences. On the sub-population of Twitter users, we examine whether climate change sentiment changes in response to five separate natural disasters occurring in the U.S. in 2018. We begin by showing that relevant tweets can be classified with over 75% accuracy as either accepting or denying climate change when using our methodology to compensate for limited labeled data; results are robust across several machine learning models and yield geographic-level results in line with prior research. We then apply RNNs to conduct a cohort-level analysis showing that the 2018 hurricanes yielded a statistically significant increase in average tweet sentiment affirming climate change. However, this effect does not hold for the 2018 blizzard and wildfires studied, implying that Twitter users' opinions on climate change are fairly ingrained on this subset of natural disasters.