On Bias and Fairness in NLP: How to have a fairer text classification?

In this paper, we provide a holistic analysis of the different sources of bias, Upstream, Sample and Overampflication biases, in NLP models. We investigate how they impact the fairness of the task of text classification. We also investigate the impact of removing these biases using different debiasing techniques on the fairness of text classification. We found that overamplification bias is the most impactful bias on the fairness of text classification. And that removing overamplification bias by fine-tuning the LM models on a dataset with balanced representations of the different identity groups leads to fairer text classification models. Finally, we build on our findings and introduce practical guidelines on how to have a fairer text classification model.

Multiclass-SGCN: Sparse Graph-based Trajectory Prediction with Agent Class Embedding

Trajectory prediction of road users in real-world scenarios is challenging because their movement patterns are stochastic and complex. Previous pedestrian-oriented works have been successful in modelling the complex interactions among pedestrians, but fail in predicting trajectories when other types of road users are involved (e.g., cars, cyclists, etc.), because they ignore user types. Although a few recent works construct densely connected graphs with user label information, they suffer from superfluous spatial interactions and temporal dependencies. To address these issues, we propose Multiclass-SGCN, a sparse graph convolution network based approach for multi-class trajectory prediction that takes into consideration velocity and agent label information and uses a novel interaction mask to adaptively decide the spatial and temporal connections of agents based on their interaction scores. The proposed approach significantly outperformed state-of-the-art approaches on the Stanford Drone Dataset, providing more realistic and plausible trajectory predictions.