Societal biases in the usage of words, including harmful stereotypes, are frequently learned by common word embedding methods. These biases manifest not only between a word and an explicit marker of its stereotype, but also between words that share related stereotypes. This latter phenomenon, sometimes called "indirect bias,'' has resisted prior attempts at debiasing. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Biased Indirect Relationship Modification (BIRM) to mitigate indirect bias in distributional word embeddings by modifying biased relationships between words before embeddings are learned. This is done by considering how the co-occurrence probability of a given pair of words changes in the presence of words marking an attribute of bias, and using this to average out the effect of a bias attribute. To evaluate this method, we perform a series of common tests and demonstrate that measures of bias in the word embeddings are reduced in exchange for minor reduction in the semantic quality of the embeddings. In addition, we conduct novel tests for measuring indirect stereotypes by extending the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) with new test sets for indirect binary gender stereotypes. With these tests, we demonstrate the presence of more subtle stereotypes not addressed by previous work. The proposed method is able to reduce the presence of some of these new stereotypes, serving as a crucial next step towards non-stereotyped word embeddings.

本文提出了一种名为BIRM(Biased Indirect Relationship Modification)的新方法，该方法考虑到偏见因子对词对出现概率的影响，并在学习嵌入之前修改词之间的偏见关系，以缓解分布式词嵌入中的间接偏见现象。我们还扩展了词嵌入关联测试（WEAT），提出了新的测试集来测试间接的二元性别刻板印象，并展示了这些新颖测试集下的更深层次、更微妙的刻板印象存在。结果表明，该方法能够降低词嵌入中偏见程度，虽然降低了语义嵌入质量，但对更为平等的非刻板嵌入是迈向关键的一步。

检测和减轻词嵌入中的间接刻板印象