报告题目：Word embeddings via causal inference: Gender bias reducing and semantic information preserving

报告人：孔令龙教授

报告摘要：With widening deployments of natural language processing (NLP) in daily life,inherited social biases from NLP models have become more severe and problematic. Previous studies have shown that word embeddings trained on human-generated corpora have strong gender biases that can produce discriminative results in downstream tasks. Previous debiasing methods focus mainly on modeling bias and only implicitly consider semantic information while completely overlooking the complex underlying causal structure among bias and semantic components. To address these issues, we propose a novel methodology that leverages a causal inference framework to effectively remove gender bias. The proposed method allows us to construct and analyze the complex causal mechanisms facilitating gender information flow while retaining oracle semantic information within word embeddings. Our comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in gender-debiasing tasks. In addition, our methods yield better performance in word similarity evaluation and various extrinsic downstream NLP tasks.

报告时间：7 月 7 日（周五）下午 16:00—16:50

报告地点：统计与数据科学学院 213 会议室

报告人简介：Dr. Linglong Kong is a professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and is a fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII). His publication record includes more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in top journals such as AOS, JASA and JRSSB as well as top conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICDM, AAAI, and IJCAI. Dr. Kong currently serves as associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Canadian Journal of Statistics, and Statistics and its Interface, as well as guest editor of Statistics and its Interface. Additionally, Dr. Kong is a member of the Executive Committee of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society, chair of the ASA Statistical  Computing Session program, and chair of the webinar committee. He served as a guest editor of Canadian Journal of Statistics, associate editor of International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology, guest associate editor of Frontiers of Neurosciences, chair of the ASA Statistical Imaging Session, and member of the Statistics Society of Canada's Board of Directors. He is interested in the analysis of high-dimensional and neuroimaging data, statistical machine learning, robust statistics and quantile regression, as well as artificial intelligence for smart health.