Work

The Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Role of Neutral Words in Language Model Group-Agnostic Debiasing

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, raising significant ethical concerns, especially about perpetuating stereotypes.While group-specific debiasing methods have made progress, they often fail to address multiple biases simultaneously.In contrast, group-agnostic debiasing has the potential to mitigate a variety of biases at once, but remains underexplored.In this work, we investigate the role of neutral words-the group-agnostic component-in enhancing the group-agnostic debiasing process.We first reveal that neutral words are essential for preserving semantic modeling, and we propose ϵ-DPCE, a method that incorporates a neutral word semantics-based loss function to effectively alleviate the deterioration of the Language Modeling Score (LMS) during the debiasing process.Furthermore, by introducing the SCM-Projection method, we demonstrate that SCM-based debiasing eliminates stereotypes by indirectly disrupting the association between attribute and neutral words in the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) space.Our experiments show that neutral words, which often embed multi-group stereotypical objects, play a key role in contributing to the group-agnostic nature of SCM-based debiasing.

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1044