On Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Biases in Multilingual Settings
Aniket Vashishtha Kabir Ahuja Sunayana Sitaram
While understanding and removing gender biases in language models has been a
long-standing problem in Natural Language Processing, prior research work has
primarily been limited to English. In this work, we investigate some of the
challenges with evaluating and mitigating biases in multilingual settings which
stem from a lack of existing benchmarks and resources for bias evaluation
beyond English especially for non-western context. In this paper, we first
create a benchmark for evaluating gender biases in pre-trained masked language
models by extending DisCo to different Indian languages using human
annotations. We extend various debiasing methods to work beyond English and
evaluate their effectiveness for SOTA massively multilingual models on our
proposed metric. Overall, our work highlights the challenges that arise while
studying social biases in multilingual settings and provides resources as well
as mitigation techniques to take a step toward scaling to more languages.