COLING 2022main8 citations

Quantifying Bias from Decoding Techniques in Natural Language Generation

Mayukh Das, Wolf Tilo Balke

Abstract

Natural language generation (NLG) models can propagate social bias towards particular demography. Though several studies investigated bias from data and model, NLG task distinctively uses stochastic decoder that can positively or negatively impact the bias-sensitive tokens initially predicted by the model. To address this gap in research, we present an extensive analysis of bias from decoding techniques for open-domain language generation considering the entire decoding space. We analyze to what extent bias metrics like toxicity and sentiment are impacted by the individual components of decoder algorithms. To this extent, we also analyze the trade-off between bias scores and human-annotated generation quality throughout the decoder space. Together, these methods reveal the imperative of testing inference time bias and provide evidence on the usefulness of inspecting the entire decoding spectrum.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{das-balke-2022-quantifying,
    title = "Quantifying Bias from Decoding Techniques in Natural Language Generation",
    author = "Das, Mayukh  and
      Balke, Wolf Tilo",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Huang, Chu-Ren  and
      Kim, Hansaem  and
      Pustejovsky, James  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Choi, Key-Sun  and
      Ryu, Pum-Mo  and
      Chen, Hsin-Hsi  and
      Donatelli, Lucia  and
      Ji, Heng  and
      Kurohashi, Sadao  and
      Paggio, Patrizia  and
      Xue, Nianwen  and
      Kim, Seokhwan  and
      Hahm, Younggyun  and
      He, Zhong  and
      Lee, Tony Kyungil  and
      Santus, Enrico  and
      Bond, Francis  and
      Na, Seung-Hoon",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = oct,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
    publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.112/",
    pages = "1311--1323"
}