Fairness-Aware Explainable Recommendation over Knowledge Graphs

There has been growing attention on fairness considerations recently, especially in the context of intelligent decision making systems. Explainable recommendation systems, in particular, may suffer from both explanation bias and performance disparity. In this paper, we analyze different groups of users according to their level of activity, and find that bias exists in recommendation performance between different groups. We show that inactive users may be more susceptible to receiving unsatisfactory recommendations, due to insufficient training data for the inactive users, and that their recommendations may be biased by the training records of more active users, due to the nature of collaborative filtering, which leads to an unfair treatment by the system. We propose a fairness constrained approach via heuristic re-ranking to mitigate this unfairness problem in the context of explainable recommendation over knowledge graphs. We experiment on several real-world datasets with state-of-the-art knowledge graph-based explainable recommendation algorithms. The promising results show that our algorithm is not only able to provide high-quality explainable recommendations, but also reduces the recommendation unfairness in several respects.

Mitigating Gender Bias Amplification in Distribution by Posterior Regularization

Advanced machine learning techniques have boosted the performance of natural language processing. Nevertheless, recent studies, e.g., Zhao et al. (2017) show that these techniques inadvertently capture the societal bias hidden in the corpus and further amplify it. However, their analysis is conducted only on models' top predictions. In this paper, we investigate the gender bias amplification issue from the distribution perspective and demonstrate that the bias is amplified in the view of predicted probability distribution over labels. We further propose a bias mitigation approach based on posterior regularization. With little performance loss, our method can almost remove the bias amplification in the distribution. Our study sheds the light on understanding the bias amplification.

Gender Bias in Multilingual Embeddings and Cross-Lingual Transfer

Multilingual representations embed words from many languages into a single semantic space such that words with similar meanings are close to each other regardless of the language. These embeddings have been widely used in various settings, such as cross-lingual transfer, where a natural language processing (NLP) model trained on one language is deployed to another language. While the cross-lingual transfer techniques are powerful, they carry gender bias from the source to target languages. In this paper, we study gender bias in multilingual embeddings and how it affects transfer learning for NLP applications. We create a multilingual dataset for bias analysis and propose several ways for quantifying bias in multilingual representations from both the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives. Experimental results show that the magnitude of bias in the multilingual representations changes differently when we align the embeddings to different target spaces and that the alignment direction can also have an influence on the bias in transfer learning. We further provide recommendations for using the multilingual word representations for downstream tasks.

"The Boating Store Had Its Best Sail Ever": Pronunciation-attentive Contextualized Pun Recognition

Humor plays an important role in human languages and it is essential to model humor when building intelligence systems. Among different forms of humor, puns perform wordplay for humorous effects by employing words with double entendre and high phonetic similarity. However, identifying and modeling puns are challenging as puns usually involved implicit semantic or phonological tricks. In this paper, we propose Pronunciation-attentive Contextualized Pun Recognition (PCPR) to perceive human humor, detect if a sentence contains puns and locate them in the sentence. PCPR derives contextualized representation for each word in a sentence by capturing the association between the surrounding context and its corresponding phonetic symbols. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in pun detection and location tasks. In-depth analyses verify the effectiveness and robustness of PCPR.

Short-Term Temporal Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition

The purpose of gesture recognition is to recognize meaningful movements of human bodies, and gesture recognition is an important issue in computer vision. In this paper, we present a multimodal gesture recognition method based on 3D densely convolutional networks (3D-DenseNets) and improved temporal convolutional networks (TCNs). The key idea of our approach is to find a compact and effective representation of spatial and temporal features, which orderly and separately divide task of gesture video analysis into two parts: spatial analysis and temporal analysis. In spatial analysis, we adopt 3D-DenseNets to learn short-term spatio-temporal features effectively. Subsequently, in temporal analysis, we use TCNs to extract temporal features and employ improved Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SENets) to strengthen the representational power of temporal features from each TCNs' layers. The method has been evaluated on the VIVA and the NVIDIA Gesture Dynamic Hand Gesture Datasets. Our approach obtains very competitive performance on VIVA benchmarks with the classification accuracies of 91.54%, and achieve state-of-the art performance with 86.37% accuracy on NVIDIA benchmark.

Towards Understanding Gender Bias in Relation Extraction

Recent developments in Neural Relation Extraction (NRE) have made significant strides towards Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC). While much attention has been dedicated towards improvements in accuracy, there have been no attempts in the literature to our knowledge to evaluate social biases in NRE systems. We create WikiGenderBias, a distantly supervised dataset with a human annotated test set. WikiGenderBias has sentences specifically curated to analyze gender bias in relation extraction systems. We use WikiGenderBias to evaluate systems for bias and find that NRE systems exhibit gender biased predictions and lay groundwork for future evaluation of bias in NRE. We also analyze how name anonymization, hard debiasing for word embeddings, and counterfactual data augmentation affect gender bias in predictions and performance.

Examining Gender Bias in Languages with Grammatical Gender

Recent studies have shown that word embeddings exhibit gender bias inherited from the training corpora. However, most studies to date have focused on quantifying and mitigating such bias only in English. These analyses cannot be directly extended to languages that exhibit morphological agreement on gender, such as Spanish and French. In this paper, we propose new metrics for evaluating gender bias in word embeddings of these languages and further demonstrate evidence of gender bias in bilingual embeddings which align these languages with English. Finally, we extend an existing approach to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings under both monolingual and bilingual settings. Experiments on modified Word Embedding Association Test, word similarity, word translation, and word pair translation tasks show that the proposed approaches effectively reduce the gender bias while preserving the utility of the embeddings.

Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review

As Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) tools rise in popularity, it becomes increasingly vital to recognize the role they play in shaping societal biases and stereotypes. Although NLP models have shown success in modeling various applications, they propagate and may even amplify gender bias found in text corpora. While the study of bias in artificial intelligence is not new, methods to mitigate gender bias in NLP are relatively nascent. In this paper, we review contemporary studies on recognizing and mitigating gender bias in NLP. We discuss gender bias based on four forms of representation bias and analyze methods recognizing gender bias. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of existing gender debiasing methods. Finally, we discuss future studies for recognizing and mitigating gender bias in NLP.

Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings

In this paper, we quantify, analyze and mitigate gender bias exhibited in ELMo's contextualized word vectors. First, we conduct several intrinsic analyses and find that (1) training data for ELMo contains significantly more male than female entities, (2) the trained ELMo embeddings systematically encode gender information and (3) ELMo unequally encodes gender information about male and female entities. Then, we show that a state-of-the-art coreference system that depends on ELMo inherits its bias and demonstrates significant bias on the WinoBias probing corpus. Finally, we explore two methods to mitigate such gender bias and show that the bias demonstrated on WinoBias can be eliminated.

Adversarial Removal of Gender from Deep Image Representations

In this work we analyze visual recognition tasks such as object and action recognition, and demonstrate the extent to which these tasks are correlated with features corresponding to a protected variable such as gender. We introduce the concept of natural leakage to measure the intrinsic reliance of a task on a protected variable. We further show that machine learning models of visual recognition trained for these tasks tend to exacerbate the reliance on gender features. To address this, we use adversarial training to remove unwanted features corresponding to protected variables from intermediate representations in a deep neural network. Experiments on two datasets: the COCO dataset (objects), and the imSitu dataset (actions), show reductions in the extent to which models rely on gender features while maintaining most of the accuracy of the original models. These results even surpass a strong baseline that blurs or removes people from images using ground-truth annotations. Moreover, we provide convincing interpretable visual evidence through an autoencoder-augmented model showing that this approach is performing semantically meaningful removal of gender features, and thus can also be used to remove gender attributes directly from images.