Investigating Gender Bias in News Summarization

Summarization is an important application of large language models (LLMs). Most previous evaluation of summarization models has focused on their performance in content selection, grammaticality and coherence. However, it is well known that LLMs reproduce and reinforce harmful social biases. This raises the question: Do these biases affect model outputs in a relatively constrained setting like summarization? To help answer this question, we first motivate and introduce a number of definitions for biased behaviours in summarization models, along with practical measures to quantify them. Since we find biases inherent to the input document can confound our analysis, we additionally propose a method to generate input documents with carefully controlled demographic attributes. This allows us to sidestep this issue, while still working with somewhat realistic input documents. Finally, we apply our measures to summaries generated by both purpose-built summarization models and general purpose chat models. We find that content selection in single document summarization seems to be largely unaffected by bias, while hallucinations exhibit evidence of biases propagating to generated summaries.