Lecturer: Dirk Hovy is associate professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Before that, he was faculty and a postdoc in Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC, and a linguistics masters in Germany. He is interested in the interaction between language, society, and machine learning, or what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He has authored over 60 articles on these topics, including 3 best paper awards. He has organized one conference and several workshops (on abusive language, ethics in NLP, and computational social science). Outside of work, Dirk enjoys cooking, running, and leather-crafting. For updated information, see http://www.dirkhovy.com
Abstract: Never before was it so easy to write a powerful NLP system, never before did it have such a potential impact. However, these systems are now increasingly used in applications they were not intended for, by people who treat them as interchangeable black boxes. The results can be simple performance drops, but also systematic biases against various user groups. In this talk, I will discuss several types of biases that affect NLP models (based on Shah et al. 2020 and Hovy & Spruit, 2016), what their sources are, and potential counter measures.
Five Sources of Biases and Ethical Issues in NLP, and What to Do about Them – Recording