Optimising Equal Opportunity Fairness in Model Training
Aili Shen, Xudong Han, Trevor Cohn, Timothy Baldwin, Lea Frermann
Abstract
Real-world datasets often encode stereotypes and societal biases. Such biases can be implicitly captured by trained models, leading to biased predictions and exacerbating existing societal preconceptions. Existing debiasing methods, such as adversarial training and removing protected information from representations, have been shown to reduce bias. However, a disconnect between fairness criteria and training objectives makes it difficult to reason theoretically about the effectiveness of different techniques. In this work, we propose two novel training objectives which directly optimise for the widely-used criterion of equal opportunity, and show that they are effective in reducing bias while maintaining high performance over two classification tasks.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{shen-etal-2022-optimising,
title = "Optimising Equal Opportunity Fairness in Model Training",
author = "Shen, Aili and
Han, Xudong and
Cohn, Trevor and
Baldwin, Timothy and
Frermann, Lea",
editor = "Carpuat, Marine and
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine and
Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jul,
year = "2022",
address = "Seattle, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.299/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.299",
pages = "4073--4084"
}