Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2401.12720 (cs)
[Submitted on 23 Jan 2024]
Title:A Comprehensive View of the Biases of Toxicity and Sentiment Analysis Methods Towards Utterances with African American English Expressions
View a PDF of the paper titled A Comprehensive View of the Biases of Toxicity and Sentiment Analysis Methods Towards Utterances with African American English Expressions, by Guilherme H. Resende and 4 other authors
View PDFHTML (experimental)Abstract:Language is a dynamic aspect of our culture that changes when expressed in different technologies/communities. Online social networks have enabled the diffusion and evolution of different dialects, including African American English (AAE). However, this increased usage is not without barriers. One particular barrier is how sentiment (Vader, TextBlob, and Flair) and toxicity (Google's Perspective and the open-source Detoxify) methods present biases towards utterances with AAE expressions. Consider Google's Perspective to understand bias. Here, an utterance such as ``All n*ggers deserve to die respectfully. The police murder us.'' it reaches a higher toxicity than ``African-Americans deserve to die respectfully. The police murder us.''. This score difference likely arises because the tool cannot understand the re-appropriation of the term ``n*gger''. One explanation for this bias is that AI models are trained on limited datasets, and using such a term in training data is more likely to appear in a toxic utterance. While this may be plausible, the tool will make mistakes regardless. Here, we study bias on two Web-based (YouTube and Twitter) datasets and two spoken English datasets. Our analysis shows how most models present biases towards AAE in most settings. We isolate the impact of AAE expression usage via linguistic control features from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software, grammatical control features extracted via Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging from Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, and the semantic of utterances by comparing sentence embeddings from recent language models. We present consistent results on how a heavy usage of AAE expressions may cause the speaker to be considered substantially more toxic, even when speaking about nearly the same subject. Our study complements similar analyses focusing on small datasets and/or one method only.
| Comments: | Under peer review |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2401.12720 [cs.CL] |
| (orarXiv:2401.12720v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.12720 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
- Other Formats
View a PDF of the paper titled A Comprehensive View of the Biases of Toxicity and Sentiment Analysis Methods Towards Utterances with African American English Expressions, by Guilherme H. Resende and 4 other authors
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer(What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers(What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps(What is Litmaps?)
scite Smart Citations(What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv(What is alphaXiv?)
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers(What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub(What is DagsHub?)
Gotit.pub(What is GotitPub?)
Hugging Face(What is Huggingface?)
Papers with Code(What is Papers with Code?)
ScienceCast(What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
Influence Flower(What are Influence Flowers?)
CORE Recommender(What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community?Learn more about arXivLabs.