Content Conditional Debiasing for Fair Text Embedding

Mitigating biases in machine learning models has gained increasing attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Yet, only a few studies focus on fair text embeddings, which are crucial yet challenging for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning fair text embeddings. We achieve fairness while maintaining utility trade-off by ensuring conditional independence between sensitive attributes and text embeddings conditioned on the content. Specifically, we enforce that embeddings of texts with different sensitive attributes but identical content maintain the same distance toward the embedding of their corresponding neutral text. Furthermore, we address the issue of lacking proper training data by using Large Language Models (LLMs) to augment texts into different sensitive groups. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach effectively improves fairness while preserving the utility of embeddings, representing a pioneering effort in achieving conditional independence for fair text embeddings.