PEFTDebias : Capturing debiasing information using PEFTs

The increasing use of foundation models highlights the urgent need to address and eliminate implicit biases present in them that arise during pretraining. In this paper, we introduce PEFTDebias, a novel approach that employs parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to mitigate the biases within foundation models. PEFTDebias consists of two main phases: an upstream phase for acquiring debiasing parameters along a specific bias axis, and a downstream phase where these parameters are incorporated into the model and frozen during the fine-tuning process. By evaluating on four datasets across two bias axes namely gender and race, we find that downstream biases can be effectively reduced with PEFTs. In addition, we show that these parameters possess axis-specific debiasing characteristics, enabling their effective transferability in mitigating biases in various downstream tasks. To ensure reproducibility, we release the code to do our experiments.

Few-shot Unified Question Answering: Tuning Models or Prompts?

Question-answering (QA) tasks often investigate specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills, leading to specialized models catering to specific categories of QA tasks. While recent research has explored the idea of unified QA models, such models are usually explored for high-resource scenarios and require re-training to extend their capabilities. To overcome these drawbacks, the paper explores the potential of two paradigms of tuning, model, and prompts, for unified QA under a low-resource setting. The paper provides an exhaustive analysis of their applicability using 16 QA datasets, revealing that prompt tuning can perform as well as model tuning in a few-shot setting with a good initialization. The study also shows that parameter-sharing results in superior few-shot performance, simple knowledge transfer techniques for prompt initialization can be effective, and prompt tuning achieves a significant performance boost from pre-training in a low-resource regime. The research offers insights into the advantages and limitations of prompt tuning for unified QA in a few-shot setting, contributing to the development of effective and efficient systems in low-resource scenarios.

Debiasing Multilingual Word Embeddings: A Case Study of Three Indian Languages

In this paper, we advance the current state-of-the-art method for debiasing monolingual word embeddings so as to generalize well in a multilingual setting. We consider different methods to quantify bias and different debiasing approaches for monolingual as well as multilingual settings. We demonstrate the significance of our bias-mitigation approach on downstream NLP applications. Our proposed methods establish the state-of-the-art performance for debiasing multilingual embeddings for three Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu in addition to English. We believe that our work will open up new opportunities in building unbiased downstream NLP applications that are inherently dependent on the quality of the word embeddings used.

Code-switching patterns can be an effective route to improve performance of downstream NLP applications: A case study of humour, sarcasm and hate speech detection

In this paper we demonstrate how code-switching patterns can be utilised to improve various downstream NLP applications. In particular, we encode different switching features to improve humour, sarcasm and hate speech detection tasks. We believe that this simple linguistic observation can also be potentially helpful in improving other similar NLP applications.