A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers

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Main Authors: Barriere, Valentin, Cifuentes, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Barriere, Valentin
Cifuentes, Sebastian
author_facet Barriere, Valentin
Cifuentes, Sebastian
contents In this paper, we apply a method to quantify biases associated with named entities from various countries. We create counterfactual examples with small perturbations on target-domain data instead of relying on templates or specific datasets for bias detection. On widely used classifiers for subjectivity analysis, including sentiment, emotion, hate speech, and offensive text using Twitter data, our results demonstrate positive biases related to the language spoken in a country across all classifiers studied. Notably, the presence of certain country names in a sentence can strongly influence predictions, up to a 23\% change in hate speech detection and up to a 60\% change in the prediction of negative emotions such as anger. We hypothesize that these biases stem from the training data of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and find correlations between affect predictions and PLMs likelihood in English and unknown languages like Basque and Maori, revealing distinct patterns with exacerbate correlations. Further, we followed these correlations in-between counterfactual examples from a same sentence to remove the syntactical component, uncovering interesting results suggesting the impact of the pre-training data was more important for English-speaking-country names. Our anonymized code is [https://anonymous.4open.science/r/biases_ppl-576B/README.md](available here).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_01834
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers
Barriere, Valentin
Cifuentes, Sebastian
Computation and Language
In this paper, we apply a method to quantify biases associated with named entities from various countries. We create counterfactual examples with small perturbations on target-domain data instead of relying on templates or specific datasets for bias detection. On widely used classifiers for subjectivity analysis, including sentiment, emotion, hate speech, and offensive text using Twitter data, our results demonstrate positive biases related to the language spoken in a country across all classifiers studied. Notably, the presence of certain country names in a sentence can strongly influence predictions, up to a 23\% change in hate speech detection and up to a 60\% change in the prediction of negative emotions such as anger. We hypothesize that these biases stem from the training data of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and find correlations between affect predictions and PLMs likelihood in English and unknown languages like Basque and Maori, revealing distinct patterns with exacerbate correlations. Further, we followed these correlations in-between counterfactual examples from a same sentence to remove the syntactical component, uncovering interesting results suggesting the impact of the pre-training data was more important for English-speaking-country names. Our anonymized code is [https://anonymous.4open.science/r/biases_ppl-576B/README.md](available here).
title A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01834