Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: How do we design measures of social bias that we trust? While prior work has introduced several measures, no measure has gained widespread trust: instead, mounting evidence argues we should distrust these measures. In this work, we design bias measures that warrant trust based on the cross-disciplinary theory of measurement modeling. To combat the frequently fuzzy treatment of social bias in natural language processing, we explicitly define social bias, grounded in principles drawn from social science research. We operationalize our definition by proposing a general bias measurement framework DivDist, which we use to instantiate 5 concrete bias measures. To validate our measures, we propose a rigorous testing protocol with 8 testing criteria (e.g. predictive validity: do measures predict biases in US employment?). Through our testing, we demonstrate considerable evidence to trust our measures, showing they overcome conceptual, technical, and empirical deficiencies present in prior measures.
Authors: Rishi Bommasani, Percy Liang
Institution: Stanford University
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4404518459