FairLex: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Fairness in Legal Text Processing
Ilias Chalkidis, Tommaso Pasini, Sheng Zhang, Letizia Tomada, Sebastian Schwemer, Anders Søgaard
Abstract
We present a benchmark suite of four datasets for evaluating the fairness of pre-trained language models and the techniques used to fine-tune them for downstream tasks. Our benchmarks cover four jurisdictions (European Council, USA, Switzerland, and China), five languages (English, German, French, Italian and Chinese) and fairness across five attributes (gender, age, region, language, and legal area). In our experiments, we evaluate pre-trained language models using several group-robust fine-tuning techniques and show that performance group disparities are vibrant in many cases, while none of these techniques guarantee fairness, nor consistently mitigate group disparities. Furthermore, we provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of our results, highlighting open challenges in the development of robustness methods in legal NLP.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chalkidis-etal-2022-fairlex,
title = "{F}air{L}ex: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Fairness in Legal Text Processing",
author = "Chalkidis, Ilias and
Pasini, Tommaso and
Zhang, Sheng and
Tomada, Letizia and
Schwemer, Sebastian and
S{\o}gaard, Anders",
editor = "Muresan, Smaranda and
Nakov, Preslav and
Villavicencio, Aline",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = may,
year = "2022",
address = "Dublin, Ireland",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.301/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.301",
pages = "4389--4406"
}