arXiv subjects

Su Lin Blodgett

Publications and source records attributed to Su Lin Blodgett.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

"One-Size-Fits-All"? Examining Expectations around What Constitute "Fair" or "Good" NLG System Behaviors

Fairness-related assumptions about what constitute appropriate NLG system behaviors range from invariance, where systems are expected to behave identically for social groups, to adaptation, where behaviors should instead vary across them. To illuminate tensions around invariance and adaptation, we conduct five case studies, in which we perturb different types of identity-related language features (names, roles, locations, dialect, and style) in NLG system inputs. Through these cases studies, we examine people's expectations of system behaviors, and surface potential caveats of these contrasting yet commonly held assumptions. We find that motivations for adaptation include social norms, cultural differences, feature-specific information, and accommodation; in contrast, motivations for invariance include perspectives that favor prescriptivism, view adaptation as unnecessary or too difficult for NLG systems to do appropriately, and are wary of false assumptions. Our findings highlight open challenges around what constitute "fair" or "good" NLG system behaviors.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Responsible AI Considerations in Text Summarization Research: A Review of Current Practices

AI and NLP publication venues have increasingly encouraged researchers to reflect on possible ethical considerations, adverse impacts, and other responsible AI issues their work might engender. However, for specific NLP tasks our understanding of how prevalent such issues are, or when and why these issues are likely to arise, remains limited. Focusing on text summarization -- a common NLP task largely overlooked by the responsible AI community -- we examine research and reporting practices in the current literature. We conduct a multi-round qualitative analysis of 333 summarization papers from the ACL Anthology published between 2020-2022. We focus on how, which, and when responsible AI issues are covered, which relevant stakeholders are considered, and mismatches between stated and realized research goals. We also discuss current evaluation practices and consider how authors discuss the limitations of both prior work and their own work. Overall, we find that relatively few papers engage with possible stakeholders or contexts of use, which limits their consideration of potential downstream adverse impacts or other responsible AI issues. Based on our findings, we make recommendations on concrete practices and research directions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

This Prompt is Measuring : Evaluating Bias Evaluation in Language Models

Bias research in NLP seeks to analyse models for social biases, thus helping NLP practitioners uncover, measure, and mitigate social harms. We analyse the body of work that uses prompts and templates to assess bias in language models. We draw on a measurement modelling framework to create a taxonomy of attributes that capture what a bias test aims to measure and how that measurement is carried out. By applying this taxonomy to 90 bias tests, we illustrate qualitatively and quantitatively that core aspects of bias test conceptualisations and operationalisations are frequently unstated or ambiguous, carry implicit assumptions, or be mismatched. Our analysis illuminates the scope of possible bias types the field is able to measure, and reveals types that are as yet under-researched. We offer guidance to enable the community to explore a wider section of the possible bias space, and to better close the gap between desired outcomes and experimental design, both for bias and for evaluating language models more broadly.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance

Progress in NLP is increasingly measured through benchmarks; hence, contextualizing progress requires understanding when and why practitioners may disagree about the validity of benchmarks. We develop a taxonomy of disagreement, drawing on tools from measurement modeling, and distinguish between two types of disagreement: 1) how tasks are conceptualized and 2) how measurements of model performance are operationalized. To provide evidence for our taxonomy, we conduct a meta-analysis of relevant literature to understand how NLP tasks are conceptualized, as well as a survey of practitioners about their impressions of different factors that affect benchmark validity. Our meta-analysis and survey across eight tasks, ranging from coreference resolution to question answering, uncover that tasks are generally not clearly and consistently conceptualized and benchmarks suffer from operationalization disagreements. These findings support our proposed taxonomy of disagreement. Finally, based on our taxonomy, we present a framework for constructing benchmarks and documenting their limitations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Taxonomizing and Measuring Representational Harms: A Look at Image Tagging

In this paper, we examine computational approaches for measuring the "fairness" of image tagging systems, finding that they cluster into five distinct categories, each with its own analytic foundation. We also identify a range of normative concerns that are often collapsed under the terms "unfairness," "bias," or even "discrimination" when discussing problematic cases of image tagging. Specifically, we identify four types of representational harms that can be caused by image tagging systems, providing concrete examples of each. We then consider how different computational measurement approaches map to each of these types, demonstrating that there is not a one-to-one mapping. Our findings emphasize that no single measurement approach will be definitive and that it is not possible to infer from the use of a particular measurement approach which type of harm was intended to be measured. Lastly, equipped with this more granular understanding of the types of representational harms that can be caused by image tagging systems, we show that attempts to mitigate some of these types of harms may be in tension with one another.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Fairness and Sequential Decision Making: Limits, Lessons, and Opportunities

As automated decision making and decision assistance systems become common in everyday life, research on the prevention or mitigation of potential harms that arise from decisions made by these systems has proliferated. However, various research communities have independently conceptualized these harms, envisioned potential applications, and proposed interventions. The result is a somewhat fractured landscape of literature focused generally on ensuring decision-making algorithms "do the right thing". In this paper, we compare and discuss work across two major subsets of this literature: algorithmic fairness, which focuses primarily on predictive systems, and ethical decision making, which focuses primarily on sequential decision making and planning. We explore how each of these settings has articulated its normative concerns, the viability of different techniques for these different settings, and how ideas from each setting may have utility for the other.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Examining Political Rhetoric with Epistemic Stance Detection

Participants in political discourse employ rhetorical strategies -- such as hedging, attributions, or denials -- to display varying degrees of belief commitments to claims proposed by themselves or others. Traditionally, political scientists have studied these epistemic phenomena through labor-intensive manual content analysis. We propose to help automate such work through epistemic stance prediction, drawn from research in computational semantics, to distinguish at the clausal level what is asserted, denied, or only ambivalently suggested by the author or other mentioned entities (belief holders). We first develop a simple RoBERTa-based model for multi-source stance predictions that outperforms more complex state-of-the-art modeling. Then we demonstrate its novel application to political science by conducting a large-scale analysis of the Mass Market Manifestos corpus of U.S. political opinion books, where we characterize trends in cited belief holders -- respected allies and opposed bogeymen -- across U.S. political ideologies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Deconstructing NLG Evaluation: Evaluation Practices, Assumptions, and Their Implications

There are many ways to express similar things in text, which makes evaluating natural language generation (NLG) systems difficult. Compounding this difficulty is the need to assess varying quality criteria depending on the deployment setting. While the landscape of NLG evaluation has been well-mapped, practitioners' goals, assumptions, and constraints -- which inform decisions about what, when, and how to evaluate -- are often partially or implicitly stated, or not stated at all. Combining a formative semi-structured interview study of NLG practitioners (N=18) with a survey study of a broader sample of practitioners (N=61), we surface goals, community practices, assumptions, and constraints that shape NLG evaluations, examining their implications and how they embody ethical considerations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Beyond "Fairness:" Structural (In)justice Lenses on AI for Education

Educational technologies, and the systems of schooling in which they are deployed, enact particular ideologies about what is important to know and how learners should learn. As artificial intelligence technologies -- in education and beyond -- may contribute to inequitable outcomes for marginalized communities, various approaches have been developed to evaluate and mitigate the harmful impacts of AI. However, we argue in this paper that the dominant paradigm of evaluating fairness on the basis of performance disparities in AI models is inadequate for confronting the systemic inequities that educational AI systems (re)produce. We draw on a lens of structural injustice informed by critical theory and Black feminist scholarship to critically interrogate several widely-studied and widely-adopted categories of educational AI and explore how they are bound up in and reproduce historical legacies of structural injustice and inequity, regardless of the parity of their models' performance. We close with alternative visions for a more equitable future for educational AI.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Risks of AI Foundation Models in Education

If the authors of a recent Stanford report (Bommasani et al., 2021) on the opportunities and risks of "foundation models" are to be believed, these models represent a paradigm shift for AI and for the domains in which they will supposedly be used, including education. Although the name is new (and contested (Field, 2021)), the term describes existing types of algorithmic models that are "trained on broad data at scale" and "fine-tuned" (i.e., adapted) for particular downstream tasks, and is intended to encompass large language models such as BERT or GPT-3 and computer vision models such as CLIP. Such technologies have the potential for harm broadly speaking (e.g., Bender et al., 2021), but their use in the educational domain is particularly fraught, despite the potential benefits for learners claimed by the authors. In section 3.3 of the Stanford report, Malik et al. argue that achieving the goal of providing education for all learners requires more efficient computational approaches that can rapidly scale across educational domains and across educational contexts, for which they argue foundation models are uniquely well-suited. However, evidence suggests that not only are foundation models not likely to achieve the stated benefits for learners, but their use may also introduce new risks for harm.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP

Despite inextricable ties between race and language, little work has considered race in NLP research and development. In this work, we survey 79 papers from the ACL anthology that mention race. These papers reveal various types of race-related bias in all stages of NLP model development, highlighting the need for proactive consideration of how NLP systems can uphold racial hierarchies. However, persistent gaps in research on race and NLP remain: race has been siloed as a niche topic and remains ignored in many NLP tasks; most work operationalizes race as a fixed single-dimensional variable with a ground-truth label, which risks reinforcing differences produced by historical racism; and the voices of historically marginalized people are nearly absent in NLP literature. By identifying where and how NLP literature has and has not considered race, especially in comparison to related fields, our work calls for inclusion and racial justice in NLP research practices.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

How to Write a Bias Statement: Recommendations for Submissions to the Workshop on Gender Bias in NLP

At the Workshop on Gender Bias in NLP (GeBNLP), we'd like to encourage authors to give explicit consideration to the wider aspects of bias and its social implications. For the 2020 edition of the workshop, we therefore requested that all authors include an explicit bias statement in their work to clarify how their work relates to the social context in which NLP systems are used. The programme committee of the workshops included a number of reviewers with a background in the humanities and social sciences, in addition to NLP experts doing the bulk of the reviewing. Each paper was assigned one of those reviewers, and they were asked to pay specific attention to the provided bias statements in their reviews. This initiative was well received by the authors who submitted papers to the workshop, several of whom said they received useful suggestions and literature hints from the bias reviewers. We are therefore planning to keep this feature of the review process in future editions of the workshop.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP

We survey 146 papers analyzing "bias" in NLP systems, finding that their motivations are often vague, inconsistent, and lacking in normative reasoning, despite the fact that analyzing "bias" is an inherently normative process. We further find that these papers' proposed quantitative techniques for measuring or mitigating "bias" are poorly matched to their motivations and do not engage with the relevant literature outside of NLP. Based on these findings, we describe the beginnings of a path forward by proposing three recommendations that should guide work analyzing "bias" in NLP systems. These recommendations rest on a greater recognition of the relationships between language and social hierarchies, encouraging researchers and practitioners to articulate their conceptualizations of "bias"---i.e., what kinds of system behaviors are harmful, in what ways, to whom, and why, as well as the normative reasoning underlying these statements---and to center work around the lived experiences of members of communities affected by NLP systems, while interrogating and reimagining the power relations between technologists and such communities.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Monte Carlo Syntax Marginals for Exploring and Using Dependency Parses

Dependency parsing research, which has made significant gains in recent years, typically focuses on improving the accuracy of single-tree predictions. However, ambiguity is inherent to natural language syntax, and communicating such ambiguity is important for error analysis and better-informed downstream applications. In this work, we propose a transition sampling algorithm to sample from the full joint distribution of parse trees defined by a transition-based parsing model, and demonstrate the use of the samples in probabilistic dependency analysis. First, we define the new task of dependency path prediction, inferring syntactic substructures over part of a sentence, and provide the first analysis of performance on this task. Second, we demonstrate the usefulness of our Monte Carlo syntax marginal method for parser error analysis and calibration. Finally, we use this method to propagate parse uncertainty to two downstream information extraction applications: identifying persons killed by police and semantic role assignment.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Racial Disparity in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study of Social Media African-American English

We highlight an important frontier in algorithmic fairness: disparity in the quality of natural language processing algorithms when applied to language from authors of different social groups. For example, current systems sometimes analyze the language of females and minorities more poorly than they do of whites and males. We conduct an empirical analysis of racial disparity in language identification for tweets written in African-American English, and discuss implications of disparity in NLP.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2016

Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English

Though dialectal language is increasingly abundant on social media, few resources exist for developing NLP tools to handle such language. We conduct a case study of dialectal language in online conversational text by investigating African-American English (AAE) on Twitter. We propose a distantly supervised model to identify AAE-like language from demographics associated with geo-located messages, and we verify that this language follows well-known AAE linguistic phenomena. In addition, we analyze the quality of existing language identification and dependency parsing tools on AAE-like text, demonstrating that they perform poorly on such text compared to text associated with white speakers. We also provide an ensemble classifier for language identification which eliminates this disparity and release a new corpus of tweets containing AAE-like language.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Visualizing textual models with in-text and word-as-pixel highlighting

We explore two techniques which use color to make sense of statistical text models. One method uses in-text annotations to illustrate a model's view of particular tokens in particular documents. Another uses a high-level, "words-as-pixels" graphic to display an entire corpus. Together, these methods offer both zoomed-in and zoomed-out perspectives into a model's understanding of text. We show how these interconnected methods help diagnose a classifier's poor performance on Twitter slang, and make sense of a topic model on historical political texts.

stat.ML↗