Sociolectal Analysis of Pretrained Language Models

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Using data from English cloze tests, in which subjects also self-reported their gender, age, education, and race, we examine performance differences of pretrained language models across demographic groups, defined by these (protected) attributes. We demonstrate wide performance gaps across demographic groups and show that pretrained language models systematically disfavor young non-white male speakers; i.e., not only do pretrained language models learn social biases (stereotypical associations) – pretrained language models also learn sociolectal biases, learning to speak more like some than like others. We show, however, that, with the exception of BERT models, larger pretrained language models reduce some the performance gaps between majority and minority groups.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2021
Pages4581–4588
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing -
Duration: 7 Nov 202111 Nov 2021

Conference

Conference2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Periode07/11/202111/11/2021

ID: 299822479