Building Socio-culturally Inclusive Stereotype Resources with Community Engagement

With rapid development and deployment of generative language models in global settings, there is an urgent need to also scale our measurements of harm, not just in the number and types of harms covered, but also how well they account for local cultural contexts, including marginalized identities and the social biases experienced by them. Current evaluation paradigms are limited in their abilities to address this, as they are not representative of diverse, locally situated but global, socio-cultural perspectives. It is imperative that our evaluation resources are enhanced and calibrated by including people and experiences from different cultures and societies worldwide, in order to prevent gross underestimations or skews in measurements of harm. In this work, we demonstrate a socio-culturally aware expansion of evaluation resources in the Indian societal context, specifically for the harm of stereotyping. We devise a community engaged effort to build a resource which contains stereotypes for axes of disparity that are uniquely present in India. The resultant resource increases the number of stereotypes known for and in the Indian context by over 1000 stereotypes across many unique identities. We also demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of such expanded resources for evaluations of language models. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains examples of stereotypes that may be offensive.

SeeGULL: A Stereotype Benchmark with Broad Geo-Cultural Coverage Leveraging Generative Models

Stereotype benchmark datasets are crucial to detect and mitigate social stereotypes about groups of people in NLP models. However, existing datasets are limited in size and coverage, and are largely restricted to stereotypes prevalent in the Western society. This is especially problematic as language technologies gain hold across the globe. To address this gap, we present SeeGULL, a broad-coverage stereotype dataset, built by utilizing generative capabilities of large language models such as PaLM, and GPT-3, and leveraging a globally diverse rater pool to validate the prevalence of those stereotypes in society. SeeGULL is in English, and contains stereotypes about identity groups spanning 178 countries across 8 different geo-political regions across 6 continents, as well as state-level identities within the US and India. We also include fine-grained offensiveness scores for different stereotypes and demonstrate their global disparities. Furthermore, we include comparative annotations about the same groups by annotators living in the region vs. those that are based in North America, and demonstrate that within-region stereotypes about groups differ from those prevalent in North America. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains stereotype examples that may be offensive.

MD3: The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues

We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues (MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and task-oriented dialogue by prompting participants to perform a series of short information-sharing tasks. This facilitates quantitative cross-dialectal comparison, while avoiding the imposition of a restrictive task structure that might inhibit the expression of dialect features. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals significant differences in syntax and in the use of discourse markers. The dataset, which will be made publicly available with the publication of this paper, includes more than 20 hours of audio and more than 200,000 orthographically-transcribed tokens.

Cultural Re-contextualization of Fairness Research in Language Technologies in India

Recent research has revealed undesirable biases in NLP data and models. However, these efforts largely focus on social disparities in the West, and are not directly portable to other geo-cultural contexts. In this position paper, we outline a holistic research agenda to re-contextualize NLP fairness research for the Indian context, accounting for Indian societal context, bridging technological gaps in capability and resources, and adapting to Indian cultural values. We also summarize findings from an empirical study on various social biases along different axes of disparities relevant to India, demonstrating their prevalence in corpora and models.

Cultural Incongruencies in Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems attempt to imitate human behavior. How well they do this imitation is often used to assess their utility and to attribute human-like (or artificial) intelligence to them. However, most work on AI refers to and relies on human intelligence without accounting for the fact that human behavior is inherently shaped by the cultural contexts they are embedded in, the values and beliefs they hold, and the social practices they follow. Additionally, since AI technologies are mostly conceived and developed in just a handful of countries, they embed the cultural values and practices of these countries. Similarly, the data that is used to train the models also fails to equitably represent global cultural diversity. Problems therefore arise when these technologies interact with globally diverse societies and cultures, with different values and interpretive practices. In this position paper, we describe a set of cultural dependencies and incongruencies in the context of AI-based language and vision technologies, and reflect on the possibilities of and potential strategies towards addressing these incongruencies.

Re-contextualizing Fairness in NLP: The Case of India

Recent research has revealed undesirable bi-ases in NLP data and models. However, theseefforts focus of social disparities in West, andare not directly portable to other geo-culturalcontexts. In this paper, we focus on NLP fair-ness in the context of India. We start witha brief account of the prominent axes of so-cial disparities in India. We build resourcesfor fairness evaluation in the Indian contextand use them to demonstrate prediction bi-ases along some of the axes. We then delvedeeper into social stereotypes for Region andReligion, demonstrating its prevalence in cor-pora and models. Finally, we outline a holis-tic research agenda to re-contextualize NLPfairness research for the Indian context, ac-counting for Indiansocietal context, bridgingtechnologicalgaps in NLP capabilities and re-sources, and adapting to Indian culturalvalues.While we focus on India, this framework canbe generalized to other geo-cultural contexts.

Underspecification in Scene Description-to-Depiction Tasks

Questions regarding implicitness, ambiguity and underspecification are crucial for understanding the task validity and ethical concerns of multimodal image+text systems, yet have received little attention to date. This position paper maps out a conceptual framework to address this gap, focusing on systems which generate images depicting scenes from scene descriptions. In doing so, we account for how texts and images convey meaning differently. We outline a set of core challenges concerning textual and visual ambiguity, as well as risks that may be amplified by ambiguous and underspecified elements. We propose and discuss strategies for addressing these challenges, including generating visually ambiguous images, and generating a set of diverse images.

A Human Rights-Based Approach to Responsible AI

Research on fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of AI-based interventions in society has gained much-needed momentum in recent years. However it lacks an explicit alignment with a set of normative values and principles that guide this research and interventions. Rather, an implicit consensus is often assumed to hold for the values we impart into our models - something that is at odds with the pluralistic world we live in. In this paper, we put forth the doctrine of universal human rights as a set of globally salient and cross-culturally recognized set of values that can serve as a grounding framework for explicit value alignment in responsible AI - and discuss its efficacy as a framework for civil society partnership and participation. We argue that a human rights framework orients the research in this space away from the machines and the risks of their biases, and towards humans and the risks to their rights, essentially helping to center the conversation around who is harmed, what harms they face, and how those harms may be mitigated.

CrowdWorkSheets: Accounting for Individual and Collective Identities Underlying Crowdsourced Dataset Annotation

Human annotated data plays a crucial role in machine learning (ML) research and development. However, the ethical considerations around the processes and decisions that go into dataset annotation have not received nearly enough attention. In this paper, we survey an array of literature that provides insights into ethical considerations around crowdsourced dataset annotation. We synthesize these insights, and lay out the challenges in this space along two layers: (1) who the annotator is, and how the annotators' lived experiences can impact their annotations, and (2) the relationship between the annotators and the crowdsourcing platforms, and what that relationship affords them. Finally, we introduce a novel framework, CrowdWorkSheets, for dataset developers to facilitate transparent documentation of key decisions points at various stages of the data annotation pipeline: task formulation, selection of annotators, platform and infrastructure choices, dataset analysis and evaluation, and dataset release and maintenance.