# DebIE: A Platform for Implicit and Explicit Debiasing of Word Embedding Spaces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [AI Fairness 360: An Extensible Toolkit for Detecting, Understanding, and Mitigating Unwanted Algorithmic Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01943/) (2018)
- [Lipstick on a Pig: Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03862/) (2019)
- [Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08412/) (2017)
- [Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06032/) (2020)
- [Identifying and Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03035/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03310/) (2019)
- [SimLex-999: Evaluating Semantic Models with (Genuine) Similarity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.3456/) (2014)
- [Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03842/) (2019)
- [Offline bilingual word vectors, orthogonal transformations and the inverted softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03859/) (2017)
- [Attenuating Bias in Word Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07656/) (2019)
- [Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models with a Gender-Equalizing Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12801/) (2019)
- [How to (Properly) Evaluate Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings: On Strong Baselines, Comparative Analyses, and Some Misconceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00508/) (2019)
- [A General Framework for Implicit and Explicit Debiasing of Distributional Word Vector Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06092/) (2019)
- [Are We Consistently Biased? Multidimensional Analysis of Biases in Distributional Word Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11783/) (2019)
- [AraWEAT: Multidimensional Analysis of Biases in Arabic Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01575/) (2020)
- [Grammatical gender associations outweigh topical gender bias in crosslinguistic word embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08864/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [On the Independence of Association Bias and Empirical Fairness in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10153/) (2023)
- [Fairness and Bias in Multimodal AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19097/) (2024)
- [BiasTestGPT: Using ChatGPT for Social Bias Testing of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07371/) (2023)
- [VERB: Visualizing and Interpreting Bias Mitigation Techniques for Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02797/) (2021)
- [AI Fairness: from Principles to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09833/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent research efforts in NLP have demonstrated that distributional word vector spaces often encode stereotypical human biases, such as racism and sexism. With word representations ubiquitously used in NLP models and pipelines, this raises ethical issues and jeopardizes the fairness of language technologies. While there exists a large body of work on bias measures and debiasing methods, to date, there is no platform that would unify these research efforts and make bias measuring and debiasing of representation spaces widely accessible. In this work, we present DebIE, the first integrated platform for (1) measuring and (2) mitigating bias in word embeddings. Given an (i) embedding space (users can choose between the predefined spaces or upload their own) and (ii) a bias specification (users can choose between existing bias specifications or create their own), DebIE can (1) compute several measures of implicit and explicit bias and modify the embedding space by executing two (mutually composable) debiasing models. DebIE's functionality can be accessed through four different interfaces: (a) a web application, (b) a desktop application, (c) a REST-ful API, and (d) as a command-line application. DebIE is available at: debie.informatik.uni-mannheim.de.