FairPrism: Evaluating Fairness-Related Harms in Text Generation

Eve Fleisig, Aubrie N Amstutz, Chad Atalla, Su Lin Blodgett, Hal Daumé III, Alexandra Olteanu, Emily Sheng, Dan Vann, Hanna Wallach

Main: Ethics and NLP Main-poster Paper

Poster Session 1: Ethics and NLP (Poster)
Conference Room: Frontenac Ballroom and Queen's Quay
Conference Time: July 10, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Poster Session 1 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: model bias/fairness evaluation
TLDR: It is critical to measure and mitigate fairness-related harms caused by AI text generation systems, including stereotyping and demeaning harms. To that end, we introduce FairPrism, a dataset of 5,000 examples of AI-generated English text with detailed human annotations covering a diverse set of harm...
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Abstract: It is critical to measure and mitigate fairness-related harms caused by AI text generation systems, including stereotyping and demeaning harms. To that end, we introduce FairPrism, a dataset of 5,000 examples of AI-generated English text with detailed human annotations covering a diverse set of harms relating to gender and sexuality. FairPrism aims to address several limitations of existing datasets for measuring and mitigating fairness-related harms, including improved transparency, clearer specification of dataset coverage, and accounting for annotator disagreement and harms that are context-dependent. FairPrism's annotations include the extent of stereotyping and demeaning harms, the demographic groups targeted, and appropriateness for different applications. The annotations also include specific harms that occur in interactive contexts and harms that raise normative concerns when the "speaker" is an AI system. Due to its precision and granularity, FairPrism can be used to diagnose (1) the types of fairness-related harms that AI text generation systems cause, and (2) the potential limitations of mitigation methods, both of which we illustrate through case studies. Finally, the process we followed to develop FairPrism offers a recipe for building improved datasets for measuring and mitigating harms caused by AI systems.