{"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/when-do-word-embeddings-accurately-reflect","title":"When do Word Embeddings Accurately Reflect Surveys on our Beliefs About People?","arxiv_id":"2004.12043","date":"2020-04-25","proceeding":"ACL 2020 6","authors":["Kenneth Joseph","Jonathan H. Morgan"],"abstract":"Social biases are encoded in word embeddings. This presents a unique opportunity to study society historically and at scale, and a unique danger when embeddings are used in downstream applications. Here, we investigate the extent to which publicly-available word embeddings accurately reflect beliefs about certain kinds of people as measured via traditional survey methods. We find that biases found in word embeddings do, on average, closely mirror survey data across seventeen dimensions of social meaning. However, we also find that biases in embeddings are much more reflective of survey data for some dimensions of meaning (e.g. gender) than others (e.g. race), and that we can be highly confident that embedding-based measures reflect survey data only for the most salient biases.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12043v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.12043v1.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":"when-do-word-embeddings-accurately-reflect","repo_url":"https://github.com/kennyjoseph/embedding_impressions","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2004.12043","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}