Stepmothers are mean and academics are pretentious: What do pretrained language models learn about you?

Abstract

Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. In this paper, we investigate what types of stereotypical information are captured by pretrained language models. We present the first dataset comprising stereotypical attributes of a range of social groups and propose a method to elicit stereotypes encoded by pretrained language models in an unsupervised fashion. Moreover, we link the emergent stereotypes to their manifestation as basic emotions as a means to study their emotional effects in a more generalized manner. To demonstrate how our methods can be used to analyze emotion and stereotype shifts due to linguistic experience, we use fine-tuning on news sources as a case study. Our experiments expose how attitudes towards different social groups vary across models and how quickly emotions and stereotypes can shift at the fine-tuning stage.