Papers › Q-Pain: A Question Answering Dataset to Measure Social Bias in Pain Management

Q-Pain: A Question Answering Dataset to Measure Social Bias in Pain Management

3 Aug 2021arXiv:2108.01764archive 2025-07-28

Cécile Logé, Emily Ross, David Yaw Amoah Dadey, Saahil Jain, Adriel Saporta, Andrew Y. Ng, Pranav Rajpurkar

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and specifically automated Question Answering (QA) systems, have demonstrated both impressive linguistic fluency and a pernicious tendency to reflect social biases. In this study, we introduce Q-Pain, a dataset for assessing bias in medical QA in the context of pain management, one of the most challenging forms of clinical decision-making. Along with the dataset, we propose a new, rigorous framework, including a sample experimental design, to measure the potential biases present when making treatment decisions. We demonstrate its use by assessing two reference Question-Answering systems, GPT-2 and GPT-3, and find statistically significant differences in treatment between intersectional race-gender subgroups, thus reaffirming the risks posed by AI in medical settings, and the need for datasets like ours to ensure safety before medical AI applications are deployed.

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Decision MakingExperimental DesignManagementQuestion Answering

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Q-Pain

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPT-2GPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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