Word embeddings have recently been shown to reflect many of the pronounced societal biases (e.g., gender bias or racial bias). Existing studies are, however, limited in scope and do not investigate the consistency of biases across relevant dimensions like embedding models, types of texts, and different languages. In this work, we present a systematic study of biases encoded in distributional word vector spaces: we analyze how consistent the bias effects are across languages, corpora, and embedding models. Furthermore, we analyze the cross-lingual biases encoded in bilingual embedding spaces, indicative of the effects of bias transfer encompassed in cross-lingual transfer of NLP models. Our study yields some unexpected findings, e.g., that biases can be emphasized or downplayed by different embedding models or that user-generated content may be less biased than encyclopedic text. We hope our work catalyzes bias research in NLP and informs the development of bias reduction techniques.

该研究对分布式词向量空间中的偏见效应进行了系统性分析，研究表明：偏见效应在不同的词向量模型、文本类型和语言之间是不一致的，同时，双语词向量空间中的跨语言偏见也是存在的。该研究以期促进自然语言处理中的偏见研究，为偏见缓解技术的发展提供帮助。

我们是否存在一致偏差？对分布式词向量偏差的多维分析