Can Existing Methods Debias Languages Other than English? First Attempt to Analyze and Mitigate Japanese Word Embeddings

Masashi Takeshita, Yuki Katsumata, Rafal Rzepka, Kenji Araki


Abstract
It is known that word embeddings exhibit biases inherited from the corpus, and those biases reflect social stereotypes. Recently, many studies have been conducted to analyze and mitigate biases in word embeddings. Unsupervised Bias Enumeration (UBE) (Swinger et al., 2019) is one of approach to analyze biases for English, and Hard Debias (Bolukbasi et al., 2016) is the common technique to mitigate gender bias. These methods focused on English, or, in smaller extent, on Indo-European languages. However, it is not clear whether these methods can be generalized to other languages. In this paper, we apply these analyzing and mitigating methods, UBE and Hard Debias, to Japanese word embeddings. Additionally, we examine whether these methods can be used for Japanese. We experimentally show that UBE and Hard Debias cannot be sufficiently adapted to Japanese embeddings.
Anthology ID:
2020.gebnlp-1.5
Original:
2020.gebnlp-1.5v1
Version 2:
2020.gebnlp-1.5v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Hardmeier, Will Radford, Kellie Webster
Venue:
GeBNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
44–55
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.gebnlp-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Masashi Takeshita, Yuki Katsumata, Rafal Rzepka, and Kenji Araki. 2020. Can Existing Methods Debias Languages Other than English? First Attempt to Analyze and Mitigate Japanese Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 44–55, Barcelona, Spain (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Existing Methods Debias Languages Other than English? First Attempt to Analyze and Mitigate Japanese Word Embeddings (Takeshita et al., GeBNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.gebnlp-1.5.pdf