Nichelle and Nancy: The Influence of Demographic Attributes and
  Tokenization Length on First Name Biases
Haozhe An Rachel Rudinger
Through the use of first name substitution experiments, prior research has
demonstrated the tendency of social commonsense reasoning models to
systematically exhibit social biases along the dimensions of race, ethnicity,
and gender (An et al., 2023). Demographic attributes of first names, however,
are strongly correlated with corpus frequency and tokenization length, which
may influence model behavior independent of or in addition to demographic
factors. In this paper, we conduct a new series of first name substitution
experiments that measures the influence of these factors while controlling for
the others. We find that demographic attributes of a name (race, ethnicity, and
gender) and name tokenization length are both factors that systematically
affect the behavior of social commonsense reasoning models.