Understanding the Origins of Bias in Word Embeddings
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The power of machine learning systems not only promises great technical progress, but risks societal harm. As a recent example, researchers have shown that popular word embedding algorithms exhibit stereotypical biases, such as gender bias. The widespread use of these algorithms in machine learning systems, from automated translation services to curriculum vitae scanners, can amplify stereotypes in important contexts. Although methods have been developed to measure these biases and alter word embeddings to mitigate their biased representations, there is a lack of understanding in how word embedding bias depends on the training data. In this work, we develop a technique for understanding the origins of bias in word embeddings. Given a word embedding trained on a corpus, our method identifies how perturbing the corpus will affect the bias of the resulting embedding. This can be used to trace the origins of word embedding bias back to the original training documents. Using our method, one can investigate trends in the bias of the underlying corpus and identify subsets of documents whose removal would most reduce bias. We demonstrate our techniques on both a New York Times and Wikipedia corpus and find that our influence function-based approximations are very accurate.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it