@inproceedings{valentini-etal-2023-interpretability,
    title = "On the Interpretability and Significance of Bias Metrics in Texts: a {PMI}-based Approach",
    author = "Valentini, Francisco  and
      Rosati, Germ{\'a}n  and
      Blasi, Dami{\'a}n  and
      Fernandez Slezak, Diego  and
      Altszyler, Edgar",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.44",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.44",
    pages = "509--520",
    abstract = "In recent years, word embeddings have been widely used to measure biases in texts. Even if they have proven to be effective in detecting a wide variety of biases, metrics based on word embeddings lack transparency and interpretability. We analyze an alternative PMI-based metric to quantify biases in texts. It can be expressed as a function of conditional probabilities, which provides a simple interpretation in terms of word co-occurrences. We also prove that it can be approximated by an odds ratio, which allows estimating confidence intervals and statistical significance of textual biases. This approach produces similar results to metrics based on word embeddings when capturing gender gaps of the real world embedded in large corpora.",
}

In recent years, word embeddings have been widely used to measure biases in texts. Even if they have proven to be effective in detecting a wide variety of biases, metrics based on word embeddings lack transparency and interpretability. We analyze an alternative PMI-based metric to quantify biases in texts. It can be expressed as a function of conditional probabilities, which provides a simple interpretation in terms of word co-occurrences. We also prove that it can be approximated by an odds ratio, which allows estimating confidence intervals and statistical significance of textual biases. This approach produces similar results to metrics based on word embeddings when capturing gender gaps of the real world embedded in large corpora.
Valentini, Francisco Rosati, Germ{\'a}n Blasi, Dami{\'a}n Fern ez Slezak, Diego Altszyler, Edgar
On the Interpretability and Significance of Bias Metrics in Texts: a PMI-based Approach