Helpfulness and Fairness of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Task-oriented dialogue systems aim to answer questions from users and provide immediate help. Therefore, how humans perceive their helpfulness is important. However, neither the human-perceived helpfulness of task-oriented dialogue systems nor its fairness implication has been studied yet. In this paper, we define a dialogue response as helpful if it is relevant & coherent, useful, and informative to a query and study computational measurements of helpfulness. Then, we propose utilizing the helpfulness level of different groups to gauge the fairness of a dialogue system. To study this, we collect human annotations for the helpfulness of dialogue responses and build a classifier that can automatically determine the helpfulness of a response. We design experiments under 3 information-seeking scenarios and collect instances for each from Wikipedia. With collected instances, we use carefully-constructed questions to query the state-of-the-art dialogue systems. Through analysis, we find that dialogue systems tend to be more helpful for highly-developed countries than less-developed countries, uncovering a fairness issue underlying these dialogue systems.

What do Bias Measures Measure?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models propagate social biases about protected attributes such as gender, race, and nationality. To create interventions and mitigate these biases and associated harms, it is vital to be able to detect and measure such biases. While many existing works propose bias evaluation methodologies for different tasks, there remains a need to cohesively understand what biases and normative harms each of these measures captures and how different measures compare. To address this gap, this work presents a comprehensive survey of existing bias measures in NLP as a function of the associated NLP tasks, metrics, datasets, and social biases and corresponding harms. This survey also organizes metrics into different categories to present advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we propose a documentation standard for bias measures to aid their development, categorization, and appropriate usage.