EMNLP 2024finding2 citations

Evaluating Biases in Context-Dependent Sexual and Reproductive Health Questions

Sharon Levy, Tahilin Sanchez Karver, William Adler, Michelle R Kaufman, Mark Dredze

Abstract

Chat-based large language models have the opportunity to empower individuals lacking high-quality healthcare access to receive personalized information across a variety of topics. However, users may ask underspecified questions that require additional context for a model to correctly answer. We study how large language model biases are exhibited through these contextual questions in the healthcare domain. To accomplish this, we curate a dataset of sexual and reproductive healthcare questions (ContextSRH) that are dependent on age, sex, and location attributes. We compare models’ outputs with and without demographic context to determine answer alignment among our contextual questions. Our experiments reveal biases in each of these attributes, where young adult female users are favored.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{levy-etal-2024-evaluating,
    title = "Evaluating Biases in Context-Dependent Sexual and Reproductive Health Questions",
    author = "Levy, Sharon  and
      Karver, Tahilin Sanchez  and
      Adler, William  and
      Kaufman, Michelle R  and
      Dredze, Mark",
    editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser  and
      Bansal, Mohit  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.332/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.332",
    pages = "5801--5812"
}