Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

Publication Title

The 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Madrid, Spain, 2022

Publisher Name

ACM

Abstract

Increased social media use has contributed to the greater prevalence of abusive, rude, and offensive textual comments. Machine learning models have been developed to detect toxic comments online, yet these models tend to show biases against users with marginalized or minority identities (e.g., females and African Americans). Established research in debiasing toxicity classifiers often (1) takes a static or batch approach, assuming that all information is available and then making a one-time decision; and (2) uses a generic strategy to mitigate different biases (e.g., gender and racial biases) that assumes the biases are independent of one another. However, in real scenarios, the input typically arrives as a sequence of comments/words over time instead of all at once. Thus, decisions based on partial information must be made while additional input is arriving. Moreover, social bias is complex by nature. Each type of bias is defined within its unique context, which, consistent with intersectionality theory within the social sciences, might be correlated with the contexts of other forms of bias. In this work, we consider debiasing toxicity detection as a sequential decision-making process where different biases can be interdependent. In particular, we study debiasing toxicity detection with two aims: (1) to examine whether different biases tend to correlate with each other; and (2) to investigate how to jointly mitigate these correlated biases in an interactive manner to minimize the total amount of bias. At the core of our approach is a framework built upon theories of sequential Markov Decision Processes that seeks to maximize the prediction accuracy and minimize the bias measures tailored to individual biases. Evaluations on two benchmark datasets empirically validate the hypothesis that biases tend to be correlated and corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed sequential debiasing strategy.

Comments

Author Posting. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Association for Computing Machinery for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version will be published in Proceedings of 27th ACM Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), June 2022.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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