EMNLP 2021main35 citations

Fairness-aware Class Imbalanced Learning

Shivashankar Subramanian, Afshin Rahimi, Timothy Baldwin, Trevor Cohn, Lea Frermann

Abstract

Class imbalance is a common challenge in many NLP tasks, and has clear connections to bias, in that bias in training data often leads to higher accuracy for majority groups at the expense of minority groups. However there has traditionally been a disconnect between research on class-imbalanced learning and mitigating bias, and only recently have the two been looked at through a common lens. In this work we evaluate long-tail learning methods for tweet sentiment and occupation classification, and extend a margin-loss based approach with methods to enforce fairness. We empirically show through controlled experiments that the proposed approaches help mitigate both class imbalance and demographic biases.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{subramanian-etal-2021-fairness,
    title = "Fairness-aware Class Imbalanced Learning",
    author = "Subramanian, Shivashankar  and
      Rahimi, Afshin  and
      Baldwin, Timothy  and
      Cohn, Trevor  and
      Frermann, Lea",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.155/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.155",
    pages = "2045--2051"
}
Fairness-aware Class Imbalanced Learning · EMNLP 2021