Word embeddings are widely used in NLP for a vast range of tasks. It was shown that word embeddings derived from text corpora reflect gender biases in society. This phenomenon is pervasive and consistent across different word embedding models, causing serious concern. Several recent works tackle this problem, and propose methods for significantly reducing this gender bias in word embeddings, demonstrating convincing results. However, we argue that this removal is superficial. While the bias is indeed substantially reduced according to the provided bias definition, the actual effect is mostly hiding the bias, not removing it. The gender bias information is still reflected in the distances between "gender-neutralized" words in the debiased embeddings, and can be recovered from them. We present a series of experiments to support this claim, for two debiasing methods. We conclude that existing bias removal techniques are insufficient, and should not be trusted for providing gender-neutral modeling.

本研究探讨了文本话语中的性别偏见现象，评估了现有去偏置模型的实际效果，认为现有去偏置方法虽然在表面上达到了降低偏见的效果，但实际上却只是掩盖了偏见，并认为现有技术不足以构建性别中性的计算模型。

猪涂口红：去偏置方法虽然掩盖了词嵌入中系统性的性别偏差，但并未消除它们