{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/measuring-fairness-with-biased-rulers-a","title":"Measuring Fairness with Biased Rulers: A Survey on Quantifying Biases in Pretrained Language Models","arxiv_id":"2112.07447","date":"2021-12-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Pieter Delobelle","Ewoenam Kwaku Tokpo","Toon Calders","Bettina Berendt"],"abstract":"An increasing awareness of biased patterns in natural language processing resources, like BERT, has motivated many metrics to quantify `bias' and `fairness'. But comparing the results of different metrics and the works that evaluate with such metrics remains difficult, if not outright impossible. We survey the existing literature on fairness metrics for pretrained language models and experimentally evaluate compatibility, including both biases in language models as in their downstream tasks. We do this by a mixture of traditional literature survey and correlation analysis, as well as by running empirical evaluations. We find that many metrics are not compatible and highly depend on (i) templates, (ii) attribute and target seeds and (iii) the choice of embeddings. These results indicate that fairness or bias evaluation remains challenging for contextualized language models, if not at least highly subjective. To improve future comparisons and fairness evaluations, we recommend avoiding embedding-based metrics and focusing on fairness evaluations in downstream tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07447v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.07447v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"measuring-fairness-with-biased-rulers-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/ipieter/biased-rulers","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"attribute","task_name":"Attribute"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"},{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2112.07447","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2112.07447","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}