The Effect of Human v/s Synthetic Test Data and Round-tripping on Assessment of Sentiment Analysis Systems for Bias

Sentiment Analysis Systems (SASs) are data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that output polarity and emotional intensity when given a piece of text as input. Like other AIs, SASs are also known to have unstable behavior when subjected to changes in data which can make it problematic to trust out of concerns like bias when AI works with humans and data has protected attributes like gender, race, and age. Recently, an approach was introduced to assess SASs in a blackbox setting without training data or code, and rating them for bias using synthetic English data. We augment it by introducing two human-generated chatbot datasets and also consider a round-trip setting of translating the data from one language to the same through an intermediate language. We find that these settings show SASs performance in a more realistic light. Specifically, we find that rating SASs on the chatbot data showed more bias compared to the synthetic data, and round-tripping using Spanish and Danish as intermediate languages reduces the bias (up to 68% reduction) in human-generated data while, in synthetic data, it takes a surprising turn by increasing the bias! Our findings will help researchers and practitioners refine their SAS testing strategies and foster trust as SASs are considered part of more mission-critical applications for global use.