mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Quantifying Social Biases in NLP: A Generalization and Empirical Comparison of Extrinsic Fairness Metrics

arXiv 2106.14574 ↗First posted 28 Jun 2021cs.CLcited by 83

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Abstract (arXiv)

Measuring bias is key for better understanding and addressing unfairness in NLP/ML models. This is often done via fairness metrics which quantify the differences in a model's behaviour across a range of demographic groups. In this work, we shed more light on the differences and similarities between the fairness metrics used in NLP. First, we unify a broad range of existing metrics under three generalized fairness metrics, revealing the connections between them. Next, we carry out an extensive empirical comparison of existing metrics and demonstrate that the observed differences in bias measurement can be systematically explained via differences in parameter choices for our generalized metrics.

Key facts. Cited by 83 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 52 of its 90 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2021.

Builds on

52 of 90 references.

References · 52

  1. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
  2. 2016Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learningcited by 2,000
  3. 2019A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learningcited by 1,911
  4. 2016Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddingscited by 1,304
  5. 2020Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckListcited by 979
  6. 2020Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLPcited by 951
  7. 2020StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language modelscited by 911
  8. 2016Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biasescited by 894
  9. 2017Counterfactual Fairnesscited by 802
  10. 2020CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Modelscited by 703
  11. 2018Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methodscited by 657
  12. 2018Gender Bias in Coreference Resolutioncited by 438
38 more
  1. 2019Nuanced Metrics for Measuring Unintended Bias with Real Data for Text Classificationcited by 396
  2. 2019Bias in Bios: A Case Study of Semantic Representation Bias in a High-Stakes Settingcited by 346
  3. 2019Differential Privacy Has Disparate Impact on Model Accuracycited by 316
  4. 2019Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Reviewcited by 287
  5. 2019Measuring Bias in Contextualized Word Representationscited by 275
  6. 2019Lipstick on a Pig: Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Themcited by 268
  7. 2019Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translationcited by 247
  8. 2018Examining Gender and Race Bias in Two Hundred Sentiment Analysis Systemscited by 234
  9. 2019Racial Bias in Hate Speech and Abusive Language Detection Datasetscited by 208
  10. 2021Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challengescited by 201
  11. 2020Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilitiescited by 182
  12. 2020Towards Debiasing Sentence Representationscited by 170
  13. 2017Data Decisions and Theoretical Implications when Adversarially Learning Fair Representationscited by 165
  14. 2018Counterfactual Fairness in Text Classification through Robustnesscited by 150
  15. 2019Reducing Sentiment Bias in Language Models via Counterfactual Evaluationcited by 148
  16. 2020Intrinsic Bias Metrics Do Not Correlate with Application Biascited by 148
  17. 2019Predictive Biases in Natural Language Processing Models: A Conceptual Framework and Overviewcited by 137
  18. 2019Wasserstein Fair Classificationcited by 131
  19. 2021Gender Bias in Machine Translationcited by 116
  20. 2020Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generationcited by 112
  21. 2019It's All in the Name: Mitigating Gender Bias with Name-Based Counterfactual Data Substitutioncited by 102
  22. 201850 Years of Test (Un)fairness: Lessons for Machine Learningcited by 101
  23. 2020Reducing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation as a Domain Adaptation Problemcited by 86
  24. 2019Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolutioncited by 84
  25. 2019Perturbation Sensitivity Analysis to Detect Unintended Model Biasescited by 74
  26. 2019Putting Fairness Principles into Practice: Challenges, Metrics, and Improvementscited by 70
  27. 2017Racial Disparity in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study of Social Media African-American Englishcited by 69
  28. 2019Attenuating Bias in Word Vectorscited by 64
  29. 2020It's Morphin' Time! Combating Linguistic Discrimination with Inflectional Perturbationscited by 64
  30. 2020Multilingual Twitter Corpus and Baselines for Evaluating Demographic Bias in Hate Speech Recognitioncited by 43
  31. 2020Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Translation with Target Gender Annotationscited by 42
  32. 2020Stereotypical Bias Removal for Hate Speech Detection Task using Knowledge-based Generalizationscited by 40
  33. 2019Man is to Person as Woman is to Location: Measuring Gender Bias in Named Entity Recognitioncited by 28
  34. 2020Automatically Identifying Gender Issues in Machine Translation using Perturbationscited by 28
  35. 2019Towards Understanding Gender Bias in Relation Extractioncited by 23
  36. 2019Good Secretaries, Bad Truck Drivers? Occupational Gender Stereotypes in Sentiment Analysiscited by 19
  37. 2019Debiasing Embeddings for Reduced Gender Bias in Text Classificationcited by 19
  38. 2020Cyberbullying Detection with Fairness Constraintscited by 15

50 most cited of 52 All 52 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 16; 2023: 23; 2024: 20; 2025: 16; 2026: 7.

83 papers.

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  1. 2022"I'm sorry to hear that": Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Datasetcited by 160
  2. 2023Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 153
  3. 2023Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models: An Explanatory Analysis Based on Hofstede's Cultural Dimensionscited by 111
  4. 2023Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 92
  5. 2022Interactive Model Cards: A Human-Centered Approach to Model Documentationcited by 61
  6. 2023Nationality Bias in Text Generationcited by 50
  7. 2022BERTScore is Unfair: On Social Bias in Language Model-Based Metrics for Text Generationcited by 48
  8. 2023WinoQueer: A Community-in-the-Loop Benchmark for Anti-LGBTQ+ Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 42
  9. 2021Your fairness may vary: Pretrained language model fairness in toxic text classificationcited by 38
  10. 2023Comparing Biases and the Impact of Multilingual Training across Multiple Languagescited by 36
  11. 2023Investigating Subtler Biases in LLMs: Ageism, Beauty, Institutional, and Nationality Bias in Generative Modelscited by 32
  12. 2022The Tail Wagging the Dog: Dataset Construction Biases of Social Bias Benchmarkscited by 31
38 more
  1. 2024AI Safety in Generative AI Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 31
  2. 2023On the Independence of Association Bias and Empirical Fairness in Language Modelscited by 29
  3. 2023Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Modelscited by 29
  4. 2023Sociodemographic Bias in Language Models: A Survey and Forward Pathcited by 27
  5. 2024Uncovering Bias in Large Vision-Language Models at Scale with Counterfactualscited by 27
  6. 2023Survey of Social Bias in Vision-Language Modelscited by 26
  7. 2024Twists, Humps, and Pebbles: Multilingual Speech Recognition Models Exhibit Gender Performance Gapscited by 24
  8. 2022Under the Morphosyntactic Lens: A Multifaceted Evaluation of Gender Bias in Speech Translationcited by 23
  9. 2025Integrating LLMs with ITS: Recent Advances, Potentials, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 23
  10. 2022SODAPOP: Open-Ended Discovery of Social Biases in Social Commonsense Reasoning Modelscited by 22
  11. 2023FFT: Towards Harmlessness Evaluation and Analysis for LLMs with Factuality, Fairness, Toxicitycited by 22
  12. 2022Challenges in Applying Explainability Methods to Improve the Fairness of NLP Modelscited by 20
  13. 2023Automated Ableism: An Exploration of Explicit Disability Biases in Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis Modelscited by 20
  14. 2022Conformalized Fairness via Quantile Regressioncited by 19
  15. 2024See It from My Perspective: How Language Affects Cultural Bias in Image Understandingcited by 17
  16. 2024The "Colonial Impulse" of Natural Language Processing: An Audit of Bengali Sentiment Analysis Tools and Their Identity-based Biasescited by 16
  17. 2023CALM : A Multi-task Benchmark for Comprehensive Assessment of Language Model Biascited by 13
  18. 2024From Melting Pots to Misrepresentations: Exploring Harms in Generative AIcited by 13
  19. 2024Do Multilingual Large Language Models Mitigate Stereotype Bias?cited by 13
  20. 2023Nichelle and Nancy: The Influence of Demographic Attributes and Tokenization Length on First Name Biasescited by 12
  21. 2023FairSISA: Ensemble Post-Processing to Improve Fairness of Unlearning in LLMscited by 10
  22. 2024Watching the Watchers: Exposing Gender Disparities in Machine Translation Quality Estimationcited by 10
  23. 2022Robust Natural Language Processing: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 9
  24. 2023In the Name of Fairness: Assessing the Bias in Clinical Record De-identificationcited by 9
  25. 2023This Prompt is Measuring <MASK>: Evaluating Bias Evaluation in Language Modelscited by 9
  26. 2022Towards WinoQueer: Developing a Benchmark for Anti-Queer Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 8
  27. 2025Implicit Bias in LLMs: A Surveycited by 8
  28. 2022Behind the Mask: Demographic bias in name detection for PII maskingcited by 7
  29. 2022Trustworthy Social Bias Measurementcited by 7
  30. 2022Gender Bias in Meta-Embeddingscited by 6
  31. 2022Towards Procedural Fairness: Uncovering Biases in How a Toxic Language Classifier Uses Sentiment Informationcited by 6
  32. 2023Soft-prompt Tuning for Large Language Models to Evaluate Biascited by 6
  33. 2024Hey GPT, Can You be More Racist? Analysis from Crowdsourced Attempts to Elicit Biased Content from Generative AIcited by 6
  34. 2022Easy Adaptation to Mitigate Gender Bias in Multilingual Text Classificationcited by 5
  35. 2023On the Origins of Bias in NLP through the Lens of the Jim Codecited by 5
  36. 2025Evaluate Bias without Manual Test Sets: A Concept Representation Perspective for LLMscited by 5
  37. 2022A Comprehensive Study of Gender Bias in Chemical Named Entity Recognition Modelscited by 4
  38. 2023Examining Temporal Bias in Abusive Language Detectioncited by 4

50 most cited of 83 All 83 (JSON)