Detecting Emergent Intersectional Biases: Contextualized Word Embeddings Contain a Distribution of Human-like Biases
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With the starting point that implicit human biases are reflected in the statistical regularities of language, it is possible to measure biases in static word embeddings. With recent advances in natural language processing, state-of-the-art neural language models generate dynamic word embeddings dependent on the context in which the word appears. Current methods of measuring social and intersectional biases in these contextualized word embeddings rely on the effect magnitudes of bias in a small set of pre-defined sentence templates. We propose a new comprehensive method, Contextualized Embedding Association Test (CEAT), based on the distribution of 10,000 pooled effect magnitudes of bias in embedding variations and a random-effects model, dispensing with templates. Experiments on social and intersectional biases show that CEAT finds evidence of all tested biases and provides comprehensive information on the variability of effect magnitudes of the same bias in different contexts. Furthermore, we develop two methods, Intersectional Bias Detection (IBD) and Emergent Intersectional Bias Detection (EIBD), to automatically identify the intersectional biases and emergent intersectional biases from static word embeddings in addition to measuring them in contextualized word embeddings. We present the first algorithmic bias detection findings on how intersectional group members are associated with unique emergent biases that do not overlap with the biases of their constituent minority identities. IBD achieves an accuracy of 81.6 when detecting the intersectional biases of African American females and Mexican American females. EIBD reaches an accuracy of 84.7 respectively, when detecting the emergent intersectional biases unique to African American females and Mexican American females (random correct identification probability ranges from 1.0
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