# Social Biases in Automatic Evaluation Metrics for NLG

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08859 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08859/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11520/) (2021)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02622/) (2019)
- [On Measuring Social Biases in Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10561/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00591/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03310/) (2019)
- [Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00813/) (2020)
- [Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03842/) (2019)
- [Black is to Criminal as Caucasian is to Police: Detecting and Removing Multiclass Bias in Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04047/) (2019)
- [Re-evaluating Evaluation in Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07100/) (2020)
- [Q2: Evaluating Factual Consistency in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogues via Question Generation and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08202/) (2021)
- [BLEU is Not Suitable for the Evaluation of Text Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05995/) (2018)
- [Relevance of Unsupervised Metrics in Task-Oriented Dialogue for Evaluating Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09799/) (2017)
- [Perturbation CheckLists for Evaluating NLG Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05771/) (2021)
- [Re-evaluating Automatic Metrics for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07600/) (2016)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05541/) (2021)
- [Spurious Correlations in Reference-Free Evaluation of Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09890/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Watching the Watchers: Exposing Gender Disparities in Machine Translation Quality Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10995/) (2024)
- [GAMBIT+: A Challenge Set for Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation Quality Estimation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06841/) (2025)
- [LUNA: A Framework for Language Understanding and Naturalness Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04522/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many studies have revealed that word embeddings, language models, and models for specific downstream tasks in NLP are prone to social biases, especially gender bias. Recently these techniques have been gradually applied to automatic evaluation metrics for text generation. In the paper, we propose an evaluation method based on Word Embeddings Association Test (WEAT) and Sentence Embeddings Association Test (SEAT) to quantify social biases in evaluation metrics and discover that social biases are also widely present in some model-based automatic evaluation metrics. Moreover, we construct gender-swapped meta-evaluation datasets to explore the potential impact of gender bias in image caption and text summarization tasks. Results show that given gender-neutral references in the evaluation, model-based evaluation metrics may show a preference for the male hypothesis, and the performance of them, i.e. the correlation between evaluation metrics and human judgments, usually has more significant variation after gender swapping.