Joint Multiclass Debiasing of Word Embeddings

Abstract

Bias in Word Embeddings has been a subject of recent interest, along with efforts for its reduction. Current approaches show promising progress towards debiasing single bias dimensions such as gender or race. In this paper, we present a joint multiclass debiasing approach that is capable of debiasing multiple bias dimensions simultaneously. In that direction, we present two approaches, HardWEAT and SoftWEAT, that aim to reduce biases by minimizing the scores of the Word Embeddings Association Test (WEAT). We demonstrate the viability of our methods by debiasing Word Embeddings on three classes of biases (religion, gender and race) in three different publicly available word embeddings and show that our concepts can both reduce or even completely eliminate bias, while maintaining meaningful relationships between vectors in word embeddings. Our work strengthens the foundation for more unbiased neural representations of textual data.