# SODAPOP: Open-Ended Discovery of Social Biases in
Social Commonsense Reasoning Models

Haozhe An, Zongxia Li, Jieyu Zhao, Rachel Rudinger
University of Maryland, College Park
{haozhe, zli12321, jieyuz<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
###### Abstract

A common limitation of diagnostic tests for detecting social biases in NLP
models is that they may only detect stereotypic associations that are pre-
specified by the designer of the test. Since enumerating all possible
problematic associations is infeasible, it is likely these tests fail to
detect biases that are present in a model but not pre-specified by the
designer. To address this limitation, we propose sodapop111Code is available
at https://github.com/haozhe-an/SODAPOP. (SOcial bias Discovery from Answers
about PeOPle), an approach for automatic social bias discovery in social
commonsense question-answering. The sodapop pipeline generates modified
instances from the Social IQa dataset Sap et al. (2019b) by (1) substituting
names associated with different demographic groups, and (2) generating many
distractor answers from a masked language model. By using a social commonsense
model to score the generated distractors, we are able to uncover the model’s
stereotypic associations between demographic groups and an open set of words.
We also test sodapop on debiased models and show the limitations of multiple
state-of-the-art debiasing algorithms.

##  1 Introduction

Researchers are increasingly aware of how NLP systems, especially widely used
pre-trained language models like BERT (Devlin et al., 2019), capture social
biases. Social biases, which we define here as over-generalizations about
characteristics of social or demographic groups, can both adversely affect a
model’s downstream performance and cause harm to users when encoded in a
model’s representations or behaviors (Rudinger et al., 2018; Zhao et al.,
2019; Kurita et al., 2019; Blodgett et al., 2020; Czarnowska et al., 2021). In
this paper, we propose an approach to uncovering social biases in social
commonsense reasoning models. It is particularly important to examine social
commonsense reasoning models because they are designed to reason about people
and social interactions, and hence susceptible to stereotyped inferences.
Biased inferences based on social group identities mentioned or alluded to in
the input may cause representational harms to those group members.

Figure 1: An example of a modified Social IQa MCQ sample. In an open-ended
fashion, we generate distractors (Answer A and B) that contain words
uncovering model social biases when names associated with different
demographic groups are inserted into the context and question. In this
example, Answer A, with the presence of “ruthless”, is a more successful
distractor for African American female names, whereas Answer B is a more
successful distractor for European American female names due to the word
“funny”. Answer C is the correct answer choice from the Social IQa dataset.

There have been consistent efforts to diagnose multiple types of social biases
in NLP systems. Existing methods for bias detection usually involve manual
efforts to first compile a list of stereotypic and anti-stereotypic
associations between attributes and demographic groups, and then test for the
presence of those associations in models. Examples of such an approach are
Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT; Caliskan et al., 2017), Contextualized
Embedding Association Test (CEAT; Guo and Caliskan, 2021), Sentence Encoder
Association Test (SEAT; May et al., 2019), and the sensitivity test (SeT; Cao
et al., 2022). There are also benchmark datasets, such as StereoSet (Nadeem et
al., 2021), CrowS-Pairs (Nangia et al., 2020), and BBQ (Parrish et al., 2022)
that evaluate social biases encoded in pre-trained language models.

Although effective, these tests have a shortcoming: they may only be able to
detect stereotyped attributes that the designers are aware of, as a result of
searching pre-specified stereotypic model behavior within a defined scope.
These approaches will not uncover any extant harmful associations that have
not been specified in advance.

To address this limitation, we introduce sodapop to uncover social biases in
an open-ended fashion in social commonsense reasoning models. sodapop stands
for SOcial bias Discovery from Answers about PeOPle. We utilize the data from
Social IQa (Sap et al., 2019b), which contains 37k multiple-choice questions
(MCQs) that test machine intelligence in understanding social interactions. As
shown in Fig. 1, each MCQ contains a context, a question, and three choices. A
model is trained to distinguish the correct choice from the remaining two
distractors to answer the question. sodapop uses modified Social IQa examples
to discover group-attribute associations in models. The Social IQa examples
are systematically modified via (1) name substitution (to represent different
social groups), and (2) open-ended distractor generation (representing
different attributes). While sodapop requires the target social group
identities to be pre-specified (e.g., female, African American), associated
attributes are automatically discovered rather than pre-specified.

Name substitution is the process of substituting people’s names in social
commonsense MCQs while keeping everything else unchanged. A fair model should
not make radically different predictions given this change. If a model
systematically makes disparate predictions after name substitution, we
hypothesize these differences arise from demographic associations (e.g.,
gender, race/ethnicity) reflected by the names. While contexts may exist in
which models could reasonably treat different names differently (“The name is
Christine/Kristine with a C/K.”), we believe this is generally not true of
Social IQa contexts. Open-ended distractor generation produces new distractor
answers by replacing a few tokens in the original answer using a masked
language model. The resulting distractors draw from a large vocabulary,
reflecting an open-ended set of possible attributes. To reveal a model’s
biased associations between a social group and an open set of words, we
construct new MCQs with the generated distractors and analyze the model
behavior when names are substituted. Fig. 1 illustrates an example of a newly
constructed MCQ.

We use sodapop to uncover biased group-attribute associations in a finetuned
BERT MCQ model for social commonsense reasoning. We also apply sodapop to
debiased models reflecting four state-of-the-art bias mitigation algorithms,
namely Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP; Ravfogel et al., 2020),
SentenceDebias (Liang et al., 2020), Dropout (Webster et al., 2020), and
Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA; Zmigrod et al., 2019; Webster et al.,
2020). sodapop reveals that these models persist in treating names differently
based on demographic associations, despite their nominal purpose of mitigating
such biases. To summarize, our contributions are:

(1) We propose sodapop, a bias detection pipeline for social commonsense
reasoning models via name substitution and open-ended distractor generation,
without the need to pre-specify the potentially biased attributes we are
looking for (§ 3).

(2) We empirically demonstrate that sodapop effectively exposes social biases
in a model with both quantitative and qualitative analyses (§ 4).

(3) With sodapop, we find that debiased models continue to treat names
differently by their associated races and genders (§ 6).

##  2 Motivating Observations

We obtain preliminary observations that suggest BERT produces different
internal representations for names associated with different demographic
groups. These observations motivate us to use name substitution for bias
detection.

#### Clustering of name embeddings

We find that the hidden layer representations in BERT cluster by names’
associated gender and races/ethnicity. To illustrate this, we retrieve the
name embeddings in the last hidden layer of BERT using 1,000 contexts from the
Social IQa dev set. We sample 622 names that are most statistically indicative
of race or ethnicity222We adopt the definition of race/ethnicity from the US
census survey. We note that the categorizations in this definition are US-
centric and may be less applicable in other countries. based on data from
Rosenman et al. (2022). Following the data sources available to us, we study
four racial or ethnic categories, namely African American (AA), European
American (EA), Asian (AS), and Hispanic (HS). We obtain the gender statistics
of names by referencing the SSA dataset.333https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/
A name is indicative of a race/ethnicity if a high percentage of individuals
with that first name self-identify with that race/ethnicity. We set the
percentage threshold to be 0.9 for EA and AA, 0.8 for HS and 0.7 for AS, in
order to obtain about 80 names for each race/ethnicity and gender combination.
From the dataset, we include only names with a frequency of 200 or
greater.444Rarer names should be studied in future work, but we omit them here
as we anticipate they may elicit different model behavior. We use these names
to replace the token “[NAME]” in a context and obtain its corresponding
contextualized embedding. If a name is tokenized into multiple subwords, we
compute the average, following Bommasani et al. (2020); Wolfe and Caliskan
(2021).

We plot the t-SNE projection Van der Maaten and Hinton (2008) of the averaged
embeddings for each name in Fig. 2. We observe that name embeddings tend to
cluster by both gender and race/ethnicity. To quantitatively demonstrate that
name embeddings encode demographic information, we train two separate logistic
regression classifiers to predict gender and race/ethnicity associated with a
name respectively. We train each classifier on 414 names and test on 208 names
(obtained by a random split from the 622 names). We report the prediction
accuracy for both settings in Table 1. It shows that the test performance is
significantly higher than the random baseline. The high accuracy of these
linear classifiers indicates, perhaps unsurprisingly, that BERT
representations encode demographic information associated with names, and thus
has the potential to perpetuate race-, ethnicity-, or gender-based
representational harms via first names.

Figure 2: t-SNE projections of name embeddings in BERT. Name embeddings
cluster by the associated demographic traits (race/ethnicity and gender).

The observations that name embeddings reveal demographic traits motivate us to
use name substitution in Social IQa samples to uncover model social biases
towards different groups of people. We pose the following question: Given a
description of a social situation and a question about a person involved
therein, will a social commonsense model’s predicted answer depend on
demographic attributes inferable from the person’s name? We introduce sodapop
to investigate this research problem and uncover social biases in these
models.

| Train | Test | Random
---|---|---|---
Race/ethnicity | 100.00 | 82.69 | 25.00
Gender | 99.52 | 85.58 | 50.00
Table 1: Accuracy (%) of a logistic regression classifier that predicts the
race/ethnicity or gender from the name embeddings. These results indicate that
BERT encodes demographic information in name embeddings.  Figure 3: Overview
of our sodapop pipeline. We uncover social biases in models by first
generating distractors in social commonsense reasoning MCQs and then analyzing
how they influence model predictions.

##  3 The sodapop Pipeline

Fig. 3 shows an overview of our proposed framework. sodapop composes two
steps. Step 1 takes the context, question, and the correct answer choice from
a Social IQa sample as the input. It generates many distractor answer choices
by finding sentences that differ by a few tokens from the correct choice using
a masked language model. Step 2 constructs new MCQ samples by pairing up the
automatically generated distractors with the input in the first step. We
analyze how distractor words fool the MCQ model at different rates for
different name substitutions, measuring distractor word success rates for
different names.

###  3.1 Open-Ended Distractor Generation

Following Zhang et al. (2021), we use masked token prediction to find
neighboring sentences of correct answer choices to generate distractors. Alg.
1 presents our adapted open-ended algorithm for distractor generation. We
generate a set of distractors by masking at most $k$ tokens of the correct
answer choice ($k=3$ in our experiments). We adopt a recursive approach to
replace one token at a time. In each recursive step, a masked language model
fills the mask with some possible words, and the ones with the highest
prediction scores are chosen to maximize the fluency of generated distractors.
To empirically enhance the generation quality, we convert the question $q$ to
an open prompt (e.g., “How would you describe [NAME]?” becomes “[NAME] is ”).
We gather all unique distractors generated by the algorithm as the final set
of distractors for bias detection. Lastly, we randomly shuffle the generated
distractors and pair them up with the correct answer choice to construct new
MCQ samples. An example is shown in Fig. 1.

Algorithm 1 Open-ended distractor generation

1:Correct answer choice $x_{0}$, masked language model $LM$, max distance
$k\geq 1$, context $c$, question $q$

2:$\mathcal{X}_{distract}$, a set of generated distractors

3:function Gen($x_{0},k$)

4: if $k\geq 2$ then

5: return $\bigcup_{\tilde{x}\in\text{Gen}(x_{0},1)}\text{Gen}(\tilde{x},k-1)$

6: end if

7: $\mathcal{X}_{distract}\leftarrow\emptyset$

8: $\triangleright$ $\oplus$ denotes string concatenation

9: $x_{concat}\leftarrow c\oplus q\oplus x_{0}$

10: for $i\in[0,\text{len}(x))$ do

11: $i\leftarrow i+\text{len}(c)+\text{len}(q)$

12: $x\leftarrow x_{concat}$ $\triangleright$ Create a copy

13: $x^{(i)}\leftarrow\text{`[MASK]'}$

14: $Tok,Scores\leftarrow LM.fillmask(x)$

15: $\triangleright$ Get predictions with topM scores

16: $T^{m},S^{m}\leftarrow\text{topM}(Tok,Scores)$

17: $\mathcal{X}_{new}\leftarrow\left\\{x|x^{(i)}\leftarrow t,t\in
T^{m}\right\\}$

18:
$\mathcal{X}_{distract}\leftarrow\mathcal{X}_{distract}\cup\mathcal{X}_{new}$

19: end for

20: return $\mathcal{X}_{distract}$

21:end function

#### Seed names

We obtain several lists of names that represent demographic groups (genders
and races/ethnicities) as our seed names for distractor generation. Recall
that we study four racial/ethnic categories based on the available data
sources: African American (AA), European American (EA), Asian (AS), and
Hispanic (HS). We borrow AA and EA names from WEAT Caliskan et al. (2017).
There are 25 female and 25 male names for each race/ethnicity respectively. We
collect a total of 120 names that are most representative of Asian and
Hispanic people from a name dataset provided by NYC Department of Health and
Mental Hygiene.555https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/Popular-Baby-
Names/25th-nujf There are about 30 names per gender for AS and HS each. More
details are in appendix A. In Step 1 of sodapop, we insert each name into a
Social IQa MCQ as we run Alg. 1. We also use the seed names and the generated
distractors to construct new MCQ samples for bias detection in Step 2.

#### Distractor validity

We manually inspect 1,000 automatically generated distractors to evaluate
their validity. A distractor is valid if it is grammatically correct, fluent,
less plausible as the correct answer, and semantically dissimilar to the
correct answer. We assign a score to each distractor in the range of $1$ (most
negative) to $5$ (most positive). The annotation results show that most
distractors have relatively high grammar and fluency scores ($>3.8$) but low
plausibility and semantic similarity scores ($<1.6$). This shows the
distractors are generally valid. More detailed results are in appendix B.

###  3.2 Quantifying Group-Attribute Associations

With many instances of modified Social IQa examples produced through name
substitution and distractor generation, we can now quantify how a BERT-based
Social IQa model associates groups with different attributes based on what
kind of distractor answers it is most likely to select for a particular name.

#### Success Rate (SR)

We hypothesize that a model is more likely to be misled by distractors
containing words with stereotypic associations of the substituted name’s
demographic group. Hence, we study the success rate (SR) of a word $w$ for
some name $n$ by finding the probability of a distractor $\tau$ successfully
misleading the model, given that the word $w$ is in the distractor and the
name $n$ is in the context. Thus, the success rate is

$SR(w,n)=\frac{\sum_{\tau\in\mathcal{T}_{suc,n}}\mathbb{1}\left[w\in\text{tokenize}(\tau)\right]}{\sum_{\tau\in\mathcal{T}_{all,n}}\mathbb{1}\left[w\in\text{tokenize}(\tau)\right]}$
(1)

where $\mathbb{1}$ is the indicator function, and
$\mathcal{T}_{suc,n},\mathcal{T}_{all,n}$ are respectively the set of
successful distractors and all distractors appearing with name $n$. A
successful distractor refers to a distractor that misleads a MCQ model to
choose itself rather than the correct answer choice. If a model is robust to
name substitution, $SR(w,n)$ should be similar for various names (as the
question contexts are identical otherwise). If differences are observed in SR
across names, however, we will next need to investigate whether those
differences are systematically based on gender, race, and ethnicity.

#### Relative Difference (RD)

We posit that some words are more strongly associated with one demographic
group than another, and these words reflect the model’s social biases. We find
such words by computing the relative difference of SR. Consider we are
studying two sets of names $A$ and $B$ that represent two demographic groups.
We compute the difference of average SR of $w$ for each group

$d(w,A,B)=\\\ \frac{1}{\lvert A\rvert}\sum_{i=1}^{\lvert
A\rvert}SR(w,A_{i})-\frac{1}{\lvert B\rvert}\sum_{i=1}^{\lvert
B\rvert}SR(w,B_{i})$ (2)

and also the mean of SR for the two groups

$m(w,A,B)=\\\ \frac{1}{2}\cdot\sum_{G\in\\{A,B\\}}\left(\frac{1}{\lvert
G\rvert}\sum_{i=1}^{\lvert G\rvert}SR(w,G_{i})\right).$ (3)

Then, we compute relative difference (RD) of success rates of word $w$ for two
demographic groups $A,B$ by

$RD(w,A,B)=\frac{d(w,A,B)}{m(w,A,B)}.$ (4)

The sign of RD indicates to which group the word $w$ is more strongly
associated with. A positive value means $w$ is more often associated with
group $A$ whereas a negative value indicates a stronger association between
$w$ and group $B$.

#### Permutation test

To validate the statistical significance of a model’s different behavior
towards name groups, we conduct a permutation test, similar to Caliskan et al.
(2017). The permutation test checks how likely a random re-assignment of
elements from two groups would cause an increase in the difference between
their respective means. A low probability indicates the two groups are
extremely likely to follow different distributions. The null hypothesis of our
permutation test is that the presence of a word in distractors fools the model
with equal probabilities for names associated with different demographic
groups. We compute the two-sided $p$-value by

$Pr\left[\big{\lvert}d(w,A^{\dagger},B^{\dagger})\big{\rvert}>\big{\lvert}d(w,A,B)\big{\rvert}\right]$
(5)

where $A^{\dagger},B^{\dagger}$ are two sets of names obtained by randomly
partitioning $A\cup B$, subject to $\lvert A^{\dagger}\lvert=\lvert A\lvert$
and $\lvert B^{\dagger}\lvert=\lvert B\lvert$. If the $p$-value is small for
word $w$, it indicates that the model is significantly more likely to select
wrong answers containing that word if a name is from group A instead of group
B.

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 4: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using BERT as the MCQ model.

##  4 Uncovering Model Social Biases

#### Setup

We use RoBERTa-base Liu et al. (2019) for distractor generations in Alg. 1.
For MCQ predictions, we finetune BERT Devlin et al. (2019) with a multiple
choice classification head. We concatenate the context and question with each
choice in a MCQ sample, and then obtain a logit for each concatenation. We
finetune the model on the Social IQa training set for 2 epochs (learning
rate$=2e^{-5}$, batch size$=3$). The finetuned model achieves $60.51\%$
accuracy on the original development set.

###  4.1 Success Rate in Multiple Contexts

Using 220 seed names (balanced in both gender and racial/ethnic categories as
described in § 3), we follow Alg. 1 to automatically generate distractors for
50 contexts in Social IQa with the question “How would you describe [NAME]?”
We choose this question because asking for a description of a person gives us
direct access to the model’s internal representation of that person, allowing
us to assess the representational harms caused by social biases encoded in the
model. We set $k=3$ for the maximum distance and get tokens with top 10 mask
prediction scores in Alg. 1. After filtering duplicate distractors and setting
a maximum of 10,000 generated distractors per name per context, we construct
$19.2$ million MCQs with one correct answer choice and two generated
distractors. We collate all unique tokens in the generated distractors as the
set of distractor vocabulary. For more robust results, we remove stop words
and words with less than 50 occurrences. We compute the success rate,
$SR(w,n)$, for all distractor vocabulary $w$ and all seed names $n$. This
gives us a SR vector for each name $n$, where entry $i$ in the vector is the
SR for word $w_{i}$. The final dimension of SR vectors is 443.

|  | BERT | INLP-race (§ 6)
---|---|---|---
Gender | EA female and EA male | 0.98 | 0.98
AA female and AA male | 0.58 | 0.86
HS female and HS male | 0.70 | 0.70
AS female and AS male | 0.52 | 0.54
Race | EA female and AA female | 0.90 | 0.90
EA female and AS female | 0.76 | 0.76
EA female and HS female | 0.80 | 0.80
AA female and AS female | 0.64 | 0.64

Table 2: KMeans classification accuracy of SR vectors. The ideal accuracy is
$0.5$ (random binary classification). Full results are available in Table 9 in
the appendix.

#### Projection by t-SNE

We project the SR vectors by t-SNE and present the results in Fig. 4. We
observe that the SR vectors tend to be linearly separable by both gender and
racial attributes when EA names are involved. The clustering of SR vectors in
Fig.4(a), 4(b), and 4(c) demonstrates that for names belonging to the same
gender or racial group, words share similar SR in distractors. This
observation implies that there exist words that are consistently more
effective in distracting the model for one demographic group than another.
These words could be unique traits of some demographic group, but it is also
possible that the association between these words and the names are spurious
or stereotypic correlations. However, for AS and AA names in Fig. 4(d), we do
not see an obvious separation of the SR vectors by either race or gender.

To quantify the separation of clusters, we conduct a binary classification of
the SR vectors for each pair of name groups that are associated with different
demographic attributes. This evaluation is similarly used by Gonen and
Goldberg (2019); An et al. (2022). For two name groups representing different
social groups (e.g., AA female names and EA female names), we use the
classical KMeans algorithm ($K=2$) to cluster the SR vectors and make a binary
prediction that indicates the membership of either cluster. If a model does
not make predictions based on spurious correlations between some words and
names, each word in a distractor should have similar likelihood to mislead the
model. It follows that the ideal classification accuracy should be $0.5$. We
report the classification accuracy in Table 2. The classification accuracy
tends to be higher when EA names are present, whereas it is comparatively
harder to distinguish SR vectors among racial/ethnic minority groups. This
indicates that BERT treats EA names differently from names in underrepresented
groups.

AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
innocent | 0.060 | 2.1E-05 | sticking | -0.042 | 2.7E-02
cousin | 0.042 | 2.7E-05 | outgoing | -0.040 | 1.8E-03
dead | 0.042 | 5.4E-03 | loud | -0.036 | 6.0E-06
ally | 0.040 | 0.0E+00 | funny | -0.035 | 1.0E-04
violent | 0.039 | 1.0E-05 | cook | -0.032 | 2.9E-01

Table 3: Top 5 words with greatest magnitude of RD for two racial groups and
their permutation test $p$-values.

AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
vicious | 0.073 | 0.0E+00 | educated | -0.074 | 8.8E-05
brutal | 0.071 | 0.0E+00 | caring | -0.063 | 6.9E-04
stubborn | 0.066 | 1.7E-01 | aroused | -0.063 | 0.0E+00
possessive | 0.065 | 1.5E-03 | sweet | -0.060 | 7.5E-05
arrogant | 0.065 | 1.9E-04 | interesting | -0.058 | 7.2E-04

Table 4: Top 5 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context (§
4.2) for two racial groups and their $p$-values. More results are in Table 11
(appendix).

#### Words with top Relative Difference

We report a list of words with greatest magnitude of RD when BERT is used as
the MCQ model in Table 3 for two groups (AA female vs. EA female). More
results are in Table 10 (appendix). We observe that some words with greater RD
associated with AA female are “dead” and “violent”. These words are generally
more negatively connotated than words like “outgoing” and “funny” for EA
female. The small $p$-values in most permutations tests indicate that almost
all the observations are statistically significant at the significance level
$p<0.01$. It is thus evident that the MCQ model is making predictions based on
the biased correlations between these words and names. sodapop can also detect
biased correlations between words and names with different genders (see Table
13 in appendix D).

###  4.2 Success Rate in a Single Context

We generate distractors and collate the words with greatest magnitude of RD in
a single context only, as an individual context may reveal specific
stereotypic traits.

#### Setup

We use the sample in Fig. 3 as the input to sodapop. For each seed name, we
construct a total number of 109,830 MCQ samples with this single context after
generating distractors using Alg. 1.

| AA Female vs. EA Female | EA Female vs. EA Male
---|---|---
Traits | sodapop | EA Annotators | AA Annotators | sodapop | Male Annotators | Female Annotators
powerless-powerful | $\succ_{\text{powerful}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{powerful}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{powerful}}^{*}$ | $\prec_{\text{powerful}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{powerful}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{powerful}}^{\dagger}$
low status-high status | $\prec_{\text{high status}}$ | $\prec_{\text{high status}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{high status}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{high status}}$ | $\prec_{\text{high status}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{high status}}^{\dagger}$
dominated-dominant | $\succ_{\text{dominant}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{dominant}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{dominant}}^{*}$ | $\prec_{\text{dominant}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{dominant}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{dominant}}^{\dagger}$
poor-wealthy | $\prec_{\text{wealthy}}$ | $\prec_{\text{wealthy}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{wealthy}}^{\dagger}$ | $\succ_{\text{wealthy}}$ | $\prec_{\text{wealthy}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{wealthy}}$
unconfident-confident | $\prec_{\text{confident}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{confident}}^{\dagger}$ | $\succ_{\text{confident}}$ | $\prec_{\text{confident}}$ | $\prec_{\text{confident}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{confident}}^{\dagger}$
unassertive-competitive | $\prec_{\text{competitive}}$ | $\prec_{\text{competitive}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{competitive}}$ | $\prec_{\text{competitive}}$ | $\prec_{\text{competitive}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{competitive}}^{*}$
traditional-modern | $\prec_{\text{modern}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{modern}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{modern}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{modern}}$ | $\succ_{\text{modern}}$ | $\succ_{\text{modern}}^{*}$
religious-science oriented | $\prec_{\text{science oriented}}$ | $\prec_{\text{science oriented}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{science oriented}}^{\dagger}$ | $\succ_{\text{science oriented}}$ | $\prec_{\text{science oriented}}$ | $\succ_{\text{science oriented}}$
conventional-alternative | $\succ_{\text{alternative}}$ | $\prec_{\text{alternative}}$ | $\succ_{\text{alternative}}$ | $\prec_{\text{alternative}}$ | $\prec_{\text{alternative}}$ | $\succ_{\text{alternative}}^{*}$
conservative-liberal | N/A | $\succ_{\text{liberal}}^{*}$ | $\prec_{\text{liberal}}$ | N/A | $\succ_{\text{liberal}}^{*}$ | $\succ_{\text{liberal}}^{*}$
untrustworthy-trustworthy | $\prec_{\text{trustworthy}}$ | $\prec_{\text{trustworthy}}^{\dagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{trustworthy}}^{*}$ | $\prec_{\text{trustworthy}}$ | $\succ_{\text{trustworthy}}$ | $\prec_{\text{trustworthy}}$
dishonest-sincere | $\prec_{\text{sincere}}$ | $\prec_{\text{sincere}}^{*}$ | $\prec_{\text{sincere}}^{*}$ | $\succ_{\text{sincere}}^{\dagger}$ | $\succ_{\text{sincere}}$ | $\succ_{\text{sincere}}$
cold-warm | $\prec_{\text{warm}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{warm}}$ | $\succ_{\text{warm}}$ | $\prec_{\text{warm}}$ | $\succ_{\text{warm}}$ | $\succ_{\text{warm}}$
threatening-benevolent | $\prec_{\text{benevolent}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{benevolent}}^{\dagger}$ | $\succ_{\text{benevolent}}^{*}$ | $\succ_{\text{benevolent}}$ | $\succ_{\text{benevolent}}^{\dagger}$ | $\succ_{\text{benevolent}}^{\dagger}$
repellent-likable | $\prec_{\text{likable}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{likable}}^{*}$ | $\succ_{\text{likable}}^{*}$ | $\prec_{\text{likable}}$ | $\prec_{\text{likable}}$ | $\succ_{\text{likable}}$
egoistic-altruistic | $\prec_{\text{altruistic}}^{\ddagger}$ | $\prec_{\text{altruistic}}$ | $\prec_{\text{altruistic}}^{\dagger}$ | $\succ_{\text{altruistic}}$ | $\succ_{\text{altruistic}}$ | $\succ_{\text{altruistic}}$

Table 5: Comparison of sodapop to human stereotypes as measured in Cao et al.
(2022). Legend: “N/A” – no words from sodapop are mapped to the trait;
$\ddagger$ – the absolute sodapop score difference is at least $5$; $\dagger$
– the absolute difference between human scores for the two groups is at least
$20$; $*$ – same as $\dagger$ but absolute difference is at least $10$; shaded
cells – sodapop yields orderings that are consistent with human annotators.

#### Results

In Table 4, the top words for AA female distractors share a common theme of
violence; in comparison, words for EA female distractors are generally neutral
or even positively connotated (e.g., “educated”). These results coincide with
observations made by other bias tests, like WEAT and the Implicit Association
Test Greenwald et al. (1998), that AA names correlate more strongly with
unpleasant words than EA names. Table 21 in § D.2 shows the results for
gender, where the model tends to associate EA male with violence more often
than EA female. Qualitatively, it appears that limiting sodapop to a single
context (Table 4) yields more interpretable results than when aggregated over
many contexts invoking different scenarios (Table 3). In the next section, we
attempt to validate this intuition by aligning sodapop outputs with results of
prior human studies.

##  5 Validation with Human Stereotypes

Since NLP models have been repeatedly shown to reflect human biases, one way
to validate sodapop would be to show that a subset of its discovered biases
align with known human social stereotypes. To attempt this, we adopt the
Agency-Belief-Communion (ABC) stereotype model Koch et al. (2016) and cross-
reference sodapop results with the the findings of Cao et al. (2022) who
collect group-trait stereotypes through human survey methods. The ABC model
describes people using 16 pairs of opposing traits, like powerless-powerful
(Table 5). Cao et al. (2022) gather human subjects’ opinions about how
American society at large perceives a demographic group with respect to a
trait, computing a score from 0 to 100. E.g., on the powerful-powerless trait
scale, subjects rated women on average 46.8 (less powerful) and men 81.4 (more
powerful). (See Tables A14 to A17 from Cao et al. (2022).) We coarsen this to
an ordering of groups along traits, e.g., women $\prec_{\text{powerful}}$ men.
To compare the biases uncovered by sodapop, we map (where applicable)
attribute words to ABC model trait scales to induce a similar ordering, and
compare whether the orderings derived from sodapop match those from human
subjects in Cao et al. (2022), reporting results in Table 5.

We run sodapop on 12 individual contexts and take the union of top identified
words for each demographic group with $p<0.05$. Working independently, three
authors manually mapped each word to zero, one, or more ABC-model traits,
without awareness of the group-word associations. E.g., all annotators mapped
the word “brutal” to the ABC trait threatening. For each group $A$ and trait
$t$, a raw count $C(A,t)$ represents the number of times any annotator aligned
a word sodapop associated with group $A$ to trait $t$. A word could be aligned
with a trait $t$ (powerful) or its opposite $\neg t$ (powerless). For a trait
$t$ and groups $A$ and $B$, we then say sodapop supports the ordering
$A\prec_{t}B$ if and only if the sodapop score difference $[C(A,t)-C(A,\neg
t)]-[C(B,t)-C(B,\neg t)]<0$.

Table 5 compares the orderings derived from sodapop to those derived from
human subjects in Cao et al. (2022) for two racial groups, AA (female) vs EA
(female), and two gender groups, (EA) female vs (EA) male. We note that group
alignment between sodapop and Cao et al. (2022) is imperfect, as the former is
intersectional. Nonetheless, we observe that the orderings for most group-
trait pairs produced by sodapop are consistent with orderings produced by
human annotators, particularly in cases where human results are strongest
(indicated with $\dagger$). Notably, the biases uncovered by sodapop are more
consistent with EA annotators than AA annotators, while it is almost equally
consistent with both male and female annotators. In a few cases, sodapop-
derived orderings deviate from human results (e.g., powerless-powerful for AA
female vs. EA female), perhaps owing to intersectional differences. Overall,
sodapop appears capable of uncovering human-aligned stereotypes without pre-
specifying attributes. This makes it a promising method to uncover other kinds
of social overgeneralizations present in models - possibly those present in
humans but less well studied, or possibly ones entirely peculiar to machines -
in either case, carrying the potential for harm.

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 5: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using INLP-race as the MCQ model.

##  6 Debiased Models Continue to Treat Names Differently

One might expect that, in a debiased model, words in distractors will mislead
the model at similar rates for different groups. In this section, however, we
demonstrate that biases uncovered by sodapop persist in debiased models. We
apply the INLP algorithm to our finetuned BERT model in § 4 to reduce biases
along the racial dimension. Our implementation uses Bias Bench Meade et al.
(2022). This racially debiased INLP model (INLP-race) is used as the new MCQ
model.666Besides INLP-race, we present similar results with other debiasing
algorithms in appendix C and appendix D.

#### Success Rate Vectors

Fig. 5 visualizes the SR vector for various racial groups using INLP-race.
Fig. 5(a), 5(b), and 5(c) show that the SR vectors for each demographic group
remain in separable clusters even if the model is debiased along the racial
dimension. The binary KMeans classification results, shown in Table 2, are
largely similar to those of BERT. In the case of AA female and AA male, the
classification deviates further from the ideal value of $0.5$ to $0.86$,
compared to $0.58$ for BERT. The clear clustering indicates that although the
debiased model somehow mitigates biases, it does not completely remove biases
in a downstream task.

AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
innocent | 0.062 | 1.6E-05 | sticking | -0.042 | 2.7E-02
dead | 0.046 | 1.9E-03 | outgoing | -0.040 | 1.9E-03
violent | 0.041 | 0.0E+00 | loud | -0.037 | 3.0E-06
cousin | 0.040 | 6.3E-05 | funny | -0.035 | 9.5E-05
ally | 0.038 | 0.0E+00 | cook | -0.032 | 3.1E-01

Table 6: Top 5 words with greatest magnitude of RD for two racial groups with
their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here, INLP-race is used for MCQ
predictions.

#### Words with Top Relative Difference

We obtain the top 5 words with greatest magnitude of RD for INLP-race in Table
6 (more results are in Table 12 in the appendix). INLP reduces racial bias to
some extent because a subset of negatively connotated words for AA female
distractors no longer show up here. However, we still see words with extremely
small $p$-values. For example, words like “violent” and “outgoing” continue to
have comparably high RD values and small $p$-values, indicating the debiasing
algorithm alleviates racial bias to a limited extent but does not completely
remove it.

##  7 Related Work

#### Bias Detection

Detection of social biases in NLP tasks is a burgeoning research area Nangia
et al. (2020); Li et al. (2020); Sap et al. (2020); Nadeem et al. (2021);
Parrish et al. (2022). Most approaches to identifying social biases do so by
pre-specifying stereotypic and anti-stereotypic associations; sodapop,
however, is capable of uncovering model biases for attributes not pre-
specified by the researcher via the open-ended distractor generation
algorithm. Field and Tsvetkov (2020) detects gender biases in short comments
with an unsupervised approach; in comparison, sodapop is an open-ended
pipeline that uncovers multiple types of social biases encoded within a model.

#### Name Artifacts

Research shows that pre-trained language models treat names differently, due
to frequency, tokenization, and imbalanced word co-occurrences Hall Maudslay
et al. (2019); Swinger et al. (2019); Sheng et al. (2020); Shwartz et al.
(2020); Wolfe and Caliskan (2021); Czarnowska et al. (2021); Wang et al.
(2022). These works lay the foundation of our name substitution technique in
sodapop by providing empirical evidence that names receive disparate treatment
from a model.

#### Social Commonsense Reasoning

In addition to datasets targeting generic commonsense reasoning in natural
language (Roemmele et al., 2011; Mostafazadeh et al., 2016; Zhang et al.,
2017; Talmor et al., 2019; Sap et al., 2019a, inter alia), a number of
resources focusing specifically on the social aspects of commonsense reasoning
have been developed Sap et al. (2019b); Zadeh et al. (2019); Forbes et al.
(2020). Like us, Sotnikova et al. (2021) also focus on detecting social biases
in commonsense models, but differ in several important ways: they manually
evaluate social biases in generated, generic commonsense inferences based on
contexts designed to elicit bias, while this work focuses on automatic
detection of social biases in multiple choice, social commonsense question-
answers, that are not specifically designed to elicit bias.

#### Distractor Generation

Existing works generate MCQ distractors to create tests that evaluate human
skills Qiu et al. (2020); Ren and Zhu (2021). However, our algorithm, inspired
by Morris et al. (2020); Zhang et al. (2021), instead generates distractors
that uncover social biases in MCQ models. Note that Morris et al. (2020);
Zhang et al. (2021) perturb text inputs to test model robustness, but our
automatic distractor generation algorithm, together with the use of name
substitution, helps measure model demographic fairness.

##  8 Conclusion

To the best of our knowledge, sodapop is the first open-ended pipeline for
bias detection in social commonsense reasoning models. Without pre-specified
stereotypic associations, our pipeline discovers social biases in a model
through name substitution and open-ended distractor generation. We construct a
large number of MCQ samples with automatically generated distractors and
substitute the names in MCQs with those representing various demographic
groups. Analyzing the success rate of words in distractors reveals a model’s
learned social biases. We also show that biases uncovered by sodapop align
with human stereotypes, and these biases persist even in debiased models. In
future work, sodapop may be used to explore biases for other MCQ tasks, and
for tasks in languages other than English, reflecting biases in a different
cultural setting.

## Limitations

sodapop represents an attempt to measure model biases with respect to gender
and race/ethnicity. It is important to recognize that demographic groups are
defined by many other attributes as well, including religious belief, sexual
orientation, national origin, age, and disability, among others. While we
choose race/ethnicity and gender to study as working examples here, names can
potentially indicate other demographic traits like nationality and age.
However, these require other data sources with varying availability. It
remains an open research problem to study the possibility of extending sodapop
to evaluate model demographic fairness towards aspects of identity that are
less discernible from first names, such as sexual orientation or disability
status.

There are several limitations to the representations of gender, race and
ethnicity we adopt in this work. We model gender as a binary variable due to
limitations in the demographic name data we use. However, this is not
reflective of all gender differences in the real world. Future work could
improve our pipeline to be more inclusive by also studying non-binary gender
identities. Another limitation is that we treat the variable of race/ethnicity
as categorical, when in reality the racial and ethnic identities of
individuals may intersect multiple groups. While we study here the
intersection of race/ethnicity and gender, we do not study multiple
intersections of race and ethnicity, e.g., Black Hispanic.

sodapop identifies social biases exhibited by models in the treatment of first
names; however, there are other ways in which demographic information may be
conveyed through language to a model, e.g., through pronouns (she), noun
phrases (an Asian person), associated concepts (N.A.A.C.P.), dialect, etc.
sodapop does not measure disparate model behavior towards these linguistic
indicators of demographics.

Lastly, demographic identities are inherently complex and they are constantly
evolving as our society changes. Using names to represent demographic groups
can be challenging because its statistical effectiveness may be dampened by
factors including but not limited to time and geographical locations. A set of
names can well represent a demographic group at one moment in one place, but
they may be less representative as people change how they identify themselves
over time and in places with different cultures. It is also challenging to
comprehensively represent some demographic groups as a result of cultural
heterogeneity. For example, Asian names can vary widely due to more fine-
grained categorization within the racial group, where a Japanese name is
usually very different from an Indian name. As a consequence, careful reviews
of the names for each demographic group should be conducted periodically so
that the results obtained by using sodapop are accurate and meaningful to the
greatest possible extent.

## Ethics Statement

Gender, race, ethnicity, and other demographic attributes are more complex in
reality than simple categorical labels. Although many names demonstrate a
strong association with a particular demographic group through census data,
these correlations are seldom absolute. Therefore, sodapop is a method that
works over aggregate statistics, though conclusions may be harder to draw from
individual instances.

The purpose of sodapop is to further research into the manifestation of social
biases in social commonsense reasoning models. Although sodapop is sensitive
to the presence of model bias, including in “debiased” models, we caution
future researchers against using sodapop to conclude that a model is absent of
biases. Furthermore, the results produced by sodapop should not be exploited
to incite hatred towards any demographic groups or individuals.

## Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback
on this paper. We would also like to thank Hal Daumé III, Trista Cao, Shramay
Palta, and Chenglei Si for their helpful comments.

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##  Appendix A Names

###  A.1 Asian and Hispanic Name Collection for sodapop

We collect Asian and Hispanic names from _Popular Baby Names_
777https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/Popular-Baby-Names/25th-nujf provided
by Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), in addition to African
American and European American names from WEAT Caliskan et al. (2017).
Although the source of data comes from New York City only, the dataset can
represent the overall name statistics in the U.S. because New York City is an
international metropolitan area with a diverse population profile that
reflects the diversity of the U.S. population Gaddis (2017). The dataset
contains 3,165 unique popular baby names who were born from 2012 to 2019 in
New York City, along with the counts of each name by gender (male, female),
race (Hispanic, White non Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Black non
Hispanic), and year of birth. To be more specific, there are 1,529 unique
first names for Hispanic and 1,216 first names for Asian. Fig. 6 shows the
name distribution in terms of genders and the two races.

#### Name selection

Popular first names may be shared among different racial groups. Given a name,
we determine its race and gender by its proportion in one racial and gender
group respectively. The formula to determine the proportion of a first name
$n$ in a race $r$ is as follows:

${Proportion_{r}}=\frac{count(n,r)}{\sum_{r_{j}\in R}count(n,r_{j})}$ (6)

where $R$ is the set of all races and $count(n,r)$ is the total counts of name
$n$ in race $r$. Similarly, we determine the proportion of a first name $n$
for gender $g$ by

${Proportion_{g}}=\frac{count(n,g)}{\sum_{g_{j}\in G}count(n,g_{j})}$ (7)

where $G$ is the set consisting of male and female.

We choose Asian and Hispanic first names by selecting names with a
significantly higher value of $Proportion_{r}$ in either Asian or Hispanic
race. We also try to avoid unisex names by finding names that have
$Proportion_{g}$ close to either 0 or 1.

Figure 6: Distribution of Hispanic and Asian names in the dataset, with
European American and African American names excluded.

#### Resulting data

We find 60 Asian names and 60 Hispanic names – 33 Asian male names, 27 Asian
female names, 30 Hispanic male names, and 30 Hispanic female names. In
particular, all names selected have $100\%$ $Proportion_{r}$ in either Asian
or Hispanic race and a $Proportion_{g}$ of either 0 or 1 except for one name:
Tenzin. Tenzin is a $100\%$ Asian name with gender ratio 0.4871.

###  A.2 Lists of All Names

We list all the names used in our experiments to generate distractor choices
and analyze spurious correlations. To reiterate, the four races we study in
this paper are European American (EA), Afirican American (AA), Asian (AS), and
Hispanic (HS).

#### EA female

Amanda, Courtney, Heather, Melanie, Sara, Amber, Crystal, Katie, Meredith,
Shannon, Besty, Donna, Kristin, Nancy, Stephanie, Bobbie-Sue, Ellen, Lauren,
Peggy, Sue-Ellen, Colleen, Emily, Megan, Rachel, Wendy

#### EA male

Adam, Chip, Harry, Josh, Roger, Alan, Frank, Ian, Justin, Ryan, Andrew, Fred,
Jack, Matthew, Stephen, Brad, Greg, Jed, Paul, Todd, Brandon, Hank, Jonathon,
Peter, Wilbur

#### AA female

Aiesha, Lashelle, Nichelle, Shereen, Temeka, Ebony, Latisha, Shaniqua,
Tameisha, Teretha, Jasmine, Latonya, Shanise, Tanisha, Tia, Lakisha, Latoya,
Sharise, Tashika, Yolanda, Lashandra, Malika, Shavonn, Tawanda, Yvette

#### AA male

Alonzo, Jamel, Lerone, Percell, Theo, Alphonse, Jerome, Leroy, Rasaan,
Torrance, Darnell, Lamar, Lionel, Rashaun, Tyree, Deion, Lamont, Malik,
Terrence, Tyrone, Everol, Lavon, Marcellus, Terryl, Wardell

#### AS female

Tenzin, Ayesha, Vicky, Selina, Elaine, Jannat, Jenny, Syeda, Elina, Queenie,
Sharon, Alisha, Janice, Erica, Tina, Raina, Mandy, Manha, Christine, Aiza,
Arisha, Inaaya, Leela, Hafsa, Carina, Anika, Bonnie

#### AS male

Kingsley, Ayaan, Aryan, Arjun, Syed, Eason, Zayan, Anson, Benson, Lawrence,
Rohan, Ricky, Ayan, Aarav, Roy, Aayan, Rehan, Tony, Aditya, Gordon, Alston,
Rayyan, Kimi, Ahnaf, Armaan, Farhan, Damon, Jacky, Adyan, Shayan, Vihaan,
Ishaan, Aahil

#### HS female

April, Alison, Briana, Dayana, Esmeralda, Itzel, Jazlyn, Jazmin, Leslie,
Melany, Mariana, Sherlyn, Valeria, Ximena, Yaretzi, Alondra, Andrea, Aylin,
Brittany, Danna, Emely, Guadalupe, Jayleen, Lesly, Keyla, Lizbeth, Nathalie,
Allyson, Alejandra, Angelique

#### HS male

Adriel, Alejandro, Andres, Carlos, Marcos, Cesar, Cristian, Damien, Dariel,
Diego, Eduardo, Elian, Erick, Fernando, Gael, Hector, Iker, Jefferson, Johan,
Jorge, Jose, Josue, Juan, Jesus, Matias, Miguel, Moises, Roberto, Pablo, Pedro

##  Appendix B Distractor Validity

Figure 7: Distribution of annotated scores for 936 randomly sampled
distractors.

| Grammar | Fluency | Plausibility | Semantic sim
---|---|---|---|---
Mean $\pm$ std | 3.85 $\pm$ 1.2 | 3.83 $\pm$ 1.22 | 1.81 $\pm$ 1.15 | 1.57 $\pm$ 1.03

Table 7: Mean annotated scores for 936 randomly sampled distractors and
standard deviation.

We manually inspect 1,000 random distractors to ensure their validity. A valid
distractor for social commonsense reasoning MCQ should describe a consequence
or reaction that is almost impossible to happen given a social interaction
context. If a distractor describes something semantically similar to the
ground truth choice, or equally plausible, it is not a valid distractor. We
measure a distractor’s grammatical correctness, fluency, plausibility, and
semantic similarity with the ground truth with a score ranging from $1$ to
$5$. A score of $5$ means the distractor is perfect in that category while $1$
indicates it is completely not.

Out of 1,000 randomly sampled distractors, 64 contain a punctuation only. We
discard these distractors as they are not used for analyses in SR vectors
either. The results of the other 936 distractors are shown in Table 7 and Fig.
7. The annotation results indicate that in spite of some noisiness, the
generated distractors are mostly grammatically acceptable and sufficiently
fluent, but they are not plausible enough as alternative, correct choices for
MCQs and they are semantically unlike the ground truth choices used for
generation. For illustration, we include some distractors generated using Alg.
1 in Table 8.

Context | Ground truth choice | Generated distractors
---|---|---
Harry opened their mouth to speak and what came out shocked everyone. | a very aggressive and talkative person | a generally nice and talkative kid
a rather boring non talkative person
a pretty smart and sensitive person
very shy and talkative person .
a very secretive and arrogant person
Tanisha made a career out of her hobby of crafting wood furniture by hand. | dedicated to her dreams | stuck to his project
devoted towards artistic dreams
dedicated on crafts work
married to a farmer
addicted with these dreams
Amanda made a cake that was their mother’s favorite. It was their mother’s birthday. | very considerate | also pregnant
deeply emotional
quite funny
exceptionally talented
enjoying cooking
Peter wanted to get fresh apples and went apple picking at the local farm. | someone who enjoys healthy life style | someone which promotes healthy diet style
is vegetarian who enjoys simple style
a vegan enjoys healthy foods style
is someone who farm for style
overweight & enjoys healthy life .

Table 8: Examples of generated distractors using Alg. 1 with their respective
contexts and ground truth choices as the input. All samples share the same
question “How would you describe [NAME]?”

##  Appendix C Additional Analysis on Success Rate Vectors in Debiased Models

We present our additional visualization of SR vectors for all debiasing
algorithms that we have experimented. These additional illustrations are
Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP; Ravfogel et al., 2020) with gender
debiasing in Fig. 8, SentenceDebias (Liang et al., 2020) with gender and
racial debiasing in Fig. 9 and 10, Dropout (Webster et al., 2020) with general
debiasing in Fig. 11, and Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA; Zmigrod et
al., 2019; Webster et al., 2020) in Fig. 12 and 13. Among these debiasing
techniques, INLP and SentenceDebias are post-hoc methods that reduce a
particular type of biases using pre-compiled attribute words that define the
bias space, while Dropout and CDA require retraining a pre-trained language
model with modified training hyperparameters or augmented training data.

We apply these debiasing algorithms to BERT. We implement them using the Bias
Bench repository Meade et al. (2022). For post-hoc debiasing algorithms, we
apply the algorithms to our finetuned BERT model obtained in § 4.888In an
alternative setup, we first apply a post-hoc debiasing algorithm to a BERT
model and then finetune the debiased model on Social IQa. We find that,
despite the different ordering of finetuning and debiasing, a debiased model
keeps exhibiting disparate behavior towards different names. For train-time
debiasing algorithms, the debiased models are finetuned with the same set of
hyperparameters as described in § 4 and deliver similar performance on Social
IQa dev set (prediction accuracy is about $60\%\sim 62\%$ for all models).
While finetuning may re-introduce biases to the debiased model, we note that
the seed names in our experiments are disjoint from those in the Social IQa
training set. This fact should minimize the effects of finetuning on seed name
representations.

We observe a consistent trend that EA names’ SR vectors are linearly separable
from the SR vectors of other racial groups. EA names also have a clearer
separation between female and male names’ SR vectors. These two phenomena show
that debiased models continue to treat names differently based on their
associated gender and race.

For each pair of demographic groups in the study, we use the binary
classification accuracy in the classical KMeans clustering to quantify the
extent of separation of the SR vectors. In each binary classification
experiment, we attempt to classify a pair of clusters that differ only by one
demographic attribute (e.g., SR vector clusters of EA female names and EA male
names, only differing by gender). The results are available in Table 9. The
trend is that debiased models, regardless of being racially debiased or gender
debiased, still treat EA names significantly differently from other racial
groups’ names. Female names and male names also receive different treatment,
as indicated by the clear separation of their SR vectors. Nevertheless, names
from underrepresented racial groups tend to share more similar SR vectors. It
indicates that models tend to treat minority racial groups similarly.

##  Appendix D Additional Analysis on Words with Top Relative Difference

###  D.1 Relative Difference in Multiple Contexts

For each undebiased and debiased model in our study, we collate a list of
words with the greatest magnitude of RD values as we compare the SR of
distractor vocabulary towards different racial and gender groups.

We first continue the discussion for the setup of using undebiased BERT as the
MCQ model in § 4. We report the list of words with greatest magnitude of RD
values for two gender groups (EA female and EA male) in Table 13. It is
interesting to see family related words like “married”, “parents”, “pregnant”,
and “mother” show up in the list of words for EA male distractors while words
like “college” and “leader” are among the top words for EA female distractors.
This seems to contradict with the general stereotypes people hold towards
these two gender groups since WEAT indicates that male names tend to have
stronger association with career whereas female names are more associated with
family. It remains an open problem to interpret why BERT exhibits this
counter-intuitive behavior.

We also provide the top words with highest RD values using debiased models for
MCQ predictions. Results for INLP model with gender bias mitigated are shown
in Table 14. Results for SentenceDebias BERT with racial or gender bias
mitigated are in Tables15 and 16 respectively. Dropout reduces general biases
and its results are in Table 17 and 18. Finally, we present the results for
CDA BERT with racial or gender bias mitigated in Table 19 and 20.

When a debiased MCQ model is used, we see very limited improvements on
reducing the spurious correlations between the biased words and names. A
considerable number of words still have very small $p$-values. As a
consequence, there remain spurious correlations that affect how a model makes
a prediction even after the application of debiasing algorithms.

###  D.2 Relative Difference in a Single Context

We analyze words’ RD in the same single context as studied in § 4.2 and report
the words with greatest RD values for two gender groups (EA female vs. EA
male). Table 21 presents the results. Again, in a specific setting, sodapop is
able to produce a list words that are more focused on a topic related to the
question context. We see that words with highest RD values for EA male
distractors describe violence while words like “sweet” and “generous” appear
for EA female. That being said, there are also words that potentially
associates with violence for EA female distractors (e.g., “rebellious”).

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 8: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using INLP-gender as the MCQ model.

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 9: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using SentenceDebias-gender as the
MCQ model.

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 10: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using SentenceDebias-race as the MCQ
model.

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 11: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using Dropout-BERT as the MCQ model.

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 12: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using CDA-gender as the MCQ model.

(a) EA vs. AA

(b) EA vs. AS

(c) EA vs. HS

(d) AS vs. AA

Figure 13: t-SNE projection of SR vectors using CDA-race as the MCQ model.

|  | BERT | INLP-race | INLP-gender | SentenceDebias-race | SentenceDebias-gender | Dropout | CDA-race | CDA-gender
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Gender | EA female and EA male | 0.98 | 0.98 | 0.98 | 0.98 | 0.98 | 1.00 | 0.98 | 0.88
AA female and AA male | 0.58 | 0.86 | 0.90 | 0.58 | 0.58 | 0.68 | 0.54 | 0.62
HS female and HS male | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70
AS female and AS male | 0.52 | 0.54 | 0.52 | 0.52 | 0.52 | 0.52 | 0.52 | 0.52
Race | EA female and AA female | 0.90 | 0.90 | 0.90 | 0.90 | 0.90 | 0.90 | 0.90 | 0.88
EA male and AA male | 0.84 | 0.84 | 0.84 | 0.84 | 0.84 | 0.88 | 0.90 | 0.88
EA female and AS female | 0.76 | 0.76 | 0.76 | 0.76 | 0.76 | 0.80 | 0.78 | 0.76
EA male and AS male | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.74 | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.82 | 0.76 | 0.80
EA female and HS female | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.84 | 0.82
EA male and HS male | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.66 | 0.66 | 0.82
AA female and AS female | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.64 | 0.72 | 0.62 | 0.58
AA male and AS male | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.58 | 0.60 | 0.56
AA female and HS female | 0.58 | 0.58 | 0.58 | 0.58 | 0.58 | 0.58 | 0.68 | 0.58
AA male and HS male | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.70 | 0.72
HS female and AS female | 0.54 | 0.54 | 0.54 | 0.54 | 0.54 | 0.54 | 0.58 | 0.56
| HS male and AS male | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60

Table 9: KMeans classification accuracy of SR vectors over all debiased models we have experimented. The ideal accuracy is $0.5$ (random binary classification).  AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
innocent | 0.060 | 2.1E-05 | sticking | -0.042 | 2.7E-02
cousin | 0.042 | 2.7E-05 | outgoing | -0.040 | 1.8E-03
dead | 0.042 | 5.4E-03 | loud | -0.036 | 6.0E-06
ally | 0.040 | 0.0E+00 | funny | -0.035 | 1.0E-04
violent | 0.039 | 1.0E-05 | cook | -0.032 | 2.9E-01
watches | 0.034 | 5.4E-04 | told | -0.025 | 1.3E-05
associate | 0.034 | 0.0E+00 | sporting | -0.025 | 0.0E+00
acquaintance | 0.033 | 0.0E+00 | front | -0.022 | 1.0E-06
ofof | 0.029 | 2.2E-05 | talkative | -0.019 | 4.8E-05
beyond | 0.027 | 2.0E-06 | vegetarian | -0.018 | 3.5E-01
wary | 0.026 | 2.0E-06 | cool | -0.018 | 1.2E-05
next | 0.025 | 4.8E-05 | Happy | -0.017 | 5.0E-01
simple | 0.022 | 5.0E-06 | convinced | -0.016 | 1.0E-03
even | 0.022 | 2.8E-04 | old | -0.016 | 1.9E-01
college | 0.021 | 4.0E-02 | friends | -0.016 | 8.2E-02
Table 10: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD for two racial groups and their permutation test $p$-values. This extends the content in Table. 3. AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
vicious | 0.073 | 0.0E+00 | educated | -0.074 | 8.8E-05
brutal | 0.071 | 0.0E+00 | caring | -0.063 | 6.9E-04
stubborn | 0.066 | 1.7E-01 | aroused | -0.063 | 0.0E+00
possessive | 0.065 | 1.5E-03 | sweet | -0.060 | 7.5E-05
arrogant | 0.065 | 1.9E-04 | interesting | -0.058 | 7.2E-04
ruthless | 0.064 | 0.0E+00 | sophisticated | -0.052 | 0.0E+00
nasty | 0.057 | 3.1E-03 | sound | -0.050 | 2.3E-03
violent | 0.055 | 0.0E+00 | charming | -0.050 | 5.0E-06
fierce | 0.052 | 2.8E-05 | sounds | -0.049 | 1.6E-03
cruel | 0.050 | 0.0E+00 | confident | -0.048 | 7.6E-04
gentle | 0.043 | 7.5E-01 | soft | -0.048 | 3.9E-03
hostile | 0.039 | 0.0E+00 | demanding | -0.048 | 2.1E-03
man | 0.033 | 7.5E-05 | loving | -0.047 | 1.5E-01
rebellious | 0.029 | 2.0E-03 | serious | -0.045 | 2.9E-05
personality | 0.029 | 1.8E-04 | young | -0.045 | 2.0E-06
Table 11: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context (§ 4.2) for two racial groups with their permutation test $p$-values. This extends the content in Table. 4. AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
innocent | 0.062 | 1.6E-05 | sticking | -0.042 | 2.7E-02
dead | 0.046 | 1.9E-03 | outgoing | -0.040 | 1.9E-03
violent | 0.041 | 0.0E+00 | loud | -0.037 | 3.0E-06
cousin | 0.040 | 6.3E-05 | funny | -0.035 | 9.5E-05
ally | 0.038 | 0.0E+00 | cook | -0.032 | 3.1E-01
watches | 0.036 | 4.8E-04 | vegetarian | -0.024 | 2.1E-01
associate | 0.032 | 0.0E+00 | sporting | -0.024 | 0.0E+00
acquaintance | 0.030 | 0.0E+00 | front | -0.022 | 1.0E-06
beyond | 0.027 | 2.0E-06 | told | -0.020 | 1.7E-04
ofof | 0.027 | 3.1E-05 | talkative | -0.018 | 5.8E-05
next | 0.024 | 6.9E-05 | cool | -0.017 | 1.1E-05
animal | 0.024 | 3.8E-04 | old | -0.017 | 1.3E-01
simple | 0.023 | 3.0E-06 | friends | -0.017 | 4.7E-02
angry | 0.023 | 2.0E-03 | Happy | -0.017 | 5.0E-01
even | 0.023 | 1.7E-04 | dog | -0.016 | 2.8E-01
Table 12: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD for two racial groups with their $p$-values in permutation tests. INLP-BERT with racial bias mitigated is used for social commonsense MCQ predictions. This extends the content in Table. 6 EA Female Distractors | EA Male Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
cook | 0.061 | 5.0E-02 | brilliant | -0.053 | 4.6E-02
college | 0.057 | 7.0E-06 | married | -0.041 | 0.0E+00
vegetarian | 0.054 | 8.6E-02 | animal | -0.026 | 3.0E-03
outgoing | 0.047 | 1.2E-04 | parents | -0.026 | 0.0E+00
innocent | 0.030 | 2.0E-01 | pregnant | -0.024 | 0.0E+00
old | 0.027 | 2.3E-02 | friendly | -0.024 | 2.6E-05
camp | 0.024 | 0.0E+00 | wary | -0.023 | 8.0E-06
leader | 0.022 | 7.3E-04 | beyond | -0.023 | 2.0E-05
play | 0.022 | 0.0E+00 | shocked | -0.022 | 3.7E-04
husband | 0.022 | 4.0E-06 | former | -0.022 | 1.6E-02
summer | 0.020 | 0.0E+00 | name | -0.021 | 1.6E-02
boot | 0.020 | 5.7E-03 | mother | -0.020 | 0.0E+00
vegan | 0.018 | 3.9E-01 | Angry | -0.020 | 2.5E-01
fairly | 0.017 | 1.8E-04 | seen | -0.019 | 2.3E-05
talkative | 0.016 | 2.4E-05 | excellent | -0.017 | 3.1E-04
Table 13: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD for two gender groups and their $p$-values. We use BERT as the MCQ model. EA Female Distractors | EA Male Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
cook | 0.061 | 8.1E-02 | brilliant | -0.052 | 5.0E-02
vegetarian | 0.060 | 2.1E-02 | married | -0.042 | 0.0E+00
college | 0.056 | 2.0E-05 | animal | -0.034 | 2.9E-03
outgoing | 0.037 | 9.3E-04 | name | -0.027 | 2.6E-03
old | 0.032 | 2.5E-02 | shocked | -0.025 | 3.4E-04
camp | 0.024 | 0.0E+00 | pregnant | -0.024 | 0.0E+00
play | 0.022 | 0.0E+00 | friendly | -0.023 | 3.0E-05
summer | 0.021 | 0.0E+00 | beyond | -0.023 | 2.0E-05
leader | 0.021 | 4.5E-04 | parents | -0.022 | 0.0E+00
husband | 0.021 | 6.0E-06 | former | -0.022 | 1.7E-02
sticking | 0.019 | 3.0E-01 | Happy | -0.022 | 2.8E-01
boot | 0.018 | 1.4E-02 | wary | -0.021 | 1.2E-05
vegan | 0.018 | 3.9E-01 | mother | -0.020 | 0.0E+00
spoke | 0.016 | 2.7E-01 | blessed | -0.019 | 0.0E+00
liked | 0.015 | 0.0E+00 | seen | -0.019 | 1.8E-05
Table 14: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD for two gender groups and their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here we use INLP BERT with gender bias mitigated for MCQ predictions. AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
innocent | 0.060 | 2.1E-05 | sticking | -0.042 | 2.7E-02
cousin | 0.042 | 3.2E-05 | outgoing | -0.040 | 1.8E-03
dead | 0.042 | 5.4E-03 | loud | -0.036 | 5.0E-06
ally | 0.040 | 0.0E+00 | funny | -0.034 | 1.6E-04
violent | 0.039 | 9.0E-06 | cook | -0.032 | 2.9E-01
watches | 0.034 | 5.4E-04 | told | -0.025 | 1.2E-05
associate | 0.034 | 0.0E+00 | sporting | -0.025 | 0.0E+00
acquaintance | 0.033 | 0.0E+00 | front | -0.022 | 2.0E-06
ofof | 0.028 | 2.7E-05 | talkative | -0.019 | 4.6E-05
beyond | 0.027 | 2.0E-06 | vegetarian | -0.018 | 3.5E-01
wary | 0.026 | 2.0E-06 | cool | -0.018 | 1.1E-05
next | 0.025 | 4.8E-05 | old | -0.017 | 1.6E-01
college | 0.022 | 2.7E-02 | Happy | -0.017 | 5.0E-01
simple | 0.022 | 4.0E-06 | convinced | -0.016 | 1.1E-03
even | 0.022 | 2.8E-04 | brilliant | -0.016 | 7.4E-01
Table 15: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context for two racial groups with their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here we use SentenceDebias BERT with racial bias mitigated for MCQ predictions. EA Female Distractors | EA Male Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
cook | 0.061 | 5.0E-02 | brilliant | -0.053 | 4.6E-02
college | 0.056 | 9.0E-06 | married | -0.041 | 0.0E+00
vegetarian | 0.054 | 8.6E-02 | animal | -0.027 | 2.6E-03
outgoing | 0.047 | 1.2E-04 | parents | -0.026 | 0.0E+00
innocent | 0.030 | 2.0E-01 | pregnant | -0.024 | 0.0E+00
old | 0.027 | 2.3E-02 | friendly | -0.024 | 2.3E-05
camp | 0.024 | 0.0E+00 | wary | -0.023 | 8.0E-06
leader | 0.022 | 7.8E-04 | beyond | -0.023 | 1.8E-05
play | 0.022 | 0.0E+00 | former | -0.022 | 1.6E-02
husband | 0.021 | 4.0E-06 | shocked | -0.022 | 4.3E-04
summer | 0.020 | 0.0E+00 | name | -0.021 | 1.6E-02
boot | 0.020 | 5.7E-03 | mother | -0.020 | 0.0E+00
vegan | 0.018 | 3.9E-01 | Angry | -0.020 | 2.5E-01
fairly | 0.017 | 2.0E-04 | seen | -0.019 | 2.3E-05
talkative | 0.016 | 2.8E-05 | excellent | -0.017 | 3.1E-04
Table 16: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context for two gender groups with their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here we use SentenceDebias BERT with gender bias mitigated for MCQ predictions. AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
associate | 0.054 | 0.0E+00 | vegetarian | -0.054 | 8.0E-03
ally | 0.052 | 2.3E-05 | rude | -0.047 | 0.0E+00
acquaintance | 0.051 | 4.0E-06 | cat | -0.045 | 4.0E-02
vegan | 0.048 | 2.8E-02 | excellent | -0.044 | 1.0E-06
property | 0.044 | 1.5E-01 | brilliant | -0.031 | 7.7E-03
relative | 0.034 | 2.0E-05 | innocent | -0.029 | 2.3E-01
ofof | 0.032 | 3.8E-03 | nine | -0.027 | 4.0E-06
pet | 0.026 | 3.8E-01 | college | -0.027 | 3.0E-02
simple | 0.026 | 2.8E-03 | convinced | -0.025 | 7.2E-05
mine | 0.026 | 0.0E+00 | cousin | -0.022 | 9.0E-02
winter | 0.022 | 2.0E-01 | sticking | -0.021 | 2.1E-03
animal | 0.021 | 3.4E-01 | loud | -0.018 | 0.0E+00
complained | 0.020 | 9.1E-05 | Angry | -0.018 | 7.9E-03
beyond | 0.020 | 8.6E-05 | bit | -0.016 | 4.0E-04
father | 0.019 | 1.4E-03 | anyone | -0.016 | 8.0E-06
Table 17: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context for two racial groups with their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here we use Dropout BERT with general bias mitigated for MCQ predictions. EA Female Distractors | EA Male Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
college | 0.043 | 2.3E-03 | vegan | -0.056 | 1.2E-02
ally | 0.040 | 4.6E-02 | winter | -0.055 | 4.9E-05
innocent | 0.029 | 2.3E-01 | father | -0.052 | 0.0E+00
used | 0.028 | 0.0E+00 | six | -0.046 | 0.0E+00
camp | 0.026 | 0.0E+00 | married | -0.042 | 0.0E+00
pet | 0.020 | 4.9E-01 | nine | -0.041 | 0.0E+00
asked | 0.018 | 5.2E-04 | ten | -0.039 | 0.0E+00
acquaintance | 0.017 | 2.1E-01 | parents | -0.038 | 0.0E+00
prefers | 0.017 | 1.7E-01 | next | -0.037 | 1.0E-06
cousin | 0.016 | 1.8E-01 | 10 | -0.037 | 0.0E+00
rude | 0.016 | 5.9E-03 | former | -0.035 | 3.0E-03
summer | 0.015 | 3.7E-05 | blessed | -0.032 | 0.0E+00
read | 0.015 | 8.7E-04 | cat | -0.027 | 5.4E-02
today | 0.014 | 8.5E-04 | would | -0.027 | 0.0E+00
glad | 0.012 | 1.7E-02 | pregnant | -0.025 | 1.8E-02
Table 18: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context for two gender groups with their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here we use Dropout BERT with general bias mitigated for MCQ predictions. AA Female Distractors | EA Female Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
cat | 0.069 | 3.5E-02 | outgoing | -0.060 | 1.5E-04
innocent | 0.054 | 7.8E-02 | funny | -0.048 | 5.0E-06
asked | 0.052 | 6.0E-05 | sporting | -0.036 | 1.3E-04
pet | 0.041 | 2.2E-02 | quiet | -0.035 | 0.0E+00
acquaintance | 0.040 | 1.0E-04 | nice | -0.032 | 6.8E-05
next | 0.040 | 4.4E-02 | intelligent | -0.019 | 1.0E-06
watches | 0.038 | 5.2E-02 | loud | -0.018 | 1.0E-06
vegan | 0.037 | 2.1E-02 | hoping | -0.018 | 1.0E-06
violent | 0.036 | 0.0E+00 | friendly | -0.017 | 1.0E-06
promotes | 0.034 | 1.0E-06 | normally | -0.017 | 1.0E-06
animal | 0.033 | 2.4E-05 | caring | -0.017 | 3.0E-06
said | 0.033 | 2.7E-03 | nursing | -0.016 | 1.1E-05
among | 0.032 | 0.0E+00 | convinced | -0.016 | 7.9E-04
fo | 0.032 | 9.6E-02 | pretty | -0.014 | 0.0E+00
personal | 0.031 | 8.0E-06 | talkative | -0.014 | 0.0E+00
Table 19: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context for two racial groups with their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here we use CDA BERT with racial bias mitigated for MCQ predictions. EA Female Distractors | EA Male Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
acquaintance | 0.045 | 7.3E-03 | sticking | -0.052 | 8.3E-03
three | 0.023 | 1.1E-03 | brilliant | -0.052 | 1.4E-02
outgoing | 0.022 | 1.0E-02 | father | -0.039 | 0.0E+00
son | 0.020 | 1.5E-04 | Happy | -0.037 | 3.3E-01
babies | 0.019 | 2.1E-05 | fo | -0.032 | 1.2E-05
na | 0.019 | 2.9E-01 | excellent | -0.031 | 3.4E-05
used | 0.018 | 2.4E-04 | former | -0.029 | 1.5E-03
dead | 0.018 | 1.6E-01 | next | -0.027 | 2.2E-02
husband | 0.018 | 5.8E-03 | boot | -0.025 | 4.7E-03
vegetarian | 0.017 | 1.8E-01 | read | -0.024 | 3.5E-05
dear | 0.015 | 5.4E-02 | stressed | -0.022 | 0.0E+00
cat | 0.014 | 4.9E-01 | run | -0.022 | 1.5E-02
kids | 0.013 | 1.2E-05 | beyond | -0.021 | 3.1E-04
old | 0.013 | 8.4E-02 | wary | -0.020 | 3.9E-03
watched | 0.012 | 4.4E-01 | movie | -0.020 | 4.9E-01
Table 20: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context for two gender groups with their $p$-values in permutation tests. Here we use CDA BERT with gender bias mitigated for MCQ predictions. EA Female Distractors | EA Male Distractors
---|---
Word | RD |  $p$-value | Word | RD |  $p$-value
sound | 0.066 | 7.2E-05 | nasty | -0.048 | 4.0E-02
caring | 0.065 | 2.2E-04 | arrogant | -0.038 | 2.0E-06
woman | 0.062 | 0.0E+00 | ruthless | -0.036 | 1.4E-03
im | 0.058 | 5.7E-04 | brutal | -0.035 | 2.2E-02
thinking | 0.057 | 2.7E-05 | vicious | -0.033 | 2.7E-01
loving | 0.054 | 1.3E-01 | man | -0.029 | 0.0E+00
girl | 0.053 | 0.0E+00 | male | -0.024 | 2.9E-02
sweet | 0.052 | 1.7E-03 | violent | -0.018 | 5.0E-02
generous | 0.051 | 3.4E-02 | cruel | -0.018 | 5.8E-02
seems | 0.050 | 4.1E-05 | threatening | -0.015 | 2.5E-04
helpful | 0.048 | 9.2E-04 | handsome | -0.010 | 2.5E-01
explicit | 0.047 | 1.1E-04 | tough | -0.009 | 2.0E-01
rebellious | 0.047 | 1.0E-03 | sounding | -0.009 | 8.8E-03
aroused | 0.046 | 3.0E-06 | though | -0.008 | 1.4E-02
unpredictable | 0.046 | 3.4E-03 | rude | -0.008 | 3.1E-01
Table 21: Top 15 words with greatest magnitude of RD in the specific context
(§ 4.2) for two gender groups with their permutation test $p$-values. We use
BERT as the MCQ model.