Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) has been one of the preferred techniques for mitigating gender bias in natural language models. CDA techniques have mostly employed word substitution based on dictionaries. Although such dictionary-based CDA techniques have been shown to significantly improve the mitigation of gender bias, in this paper, we highlight some limitations of such dictionary-based counterfactual data augmentation techniques, such as susceptibility to ungrammatical compositions, and lack of generalization outside the set of predefined dictionary words. Model-based solutions can alleviate these problems, yet the lack of qualitative parallel training data hinders development in this direction. Therefore, we propose a combination of data processing techniques and a bi-objective training regime to develop a model-based solution for generating counterfactuals to mitigate gender bias. We implemented our proposed solution and performed an empirical evaluation which shows how our model alleviates the shortcomings of dictionary-based solutions.

The abundance of annotated data in natural language processing (NLP) poses both opportunities and challenges. While it enables the development of high-performing models for a variety of tasks, it also poses the risk of models learning harmful biases from the data, such as gender stereotypes. In this work, we investigate the role of attention, a widely-used technique in current state-of-the-art NLP models, in the propagation of social biases. Specifically, we study the relationship between the entropy of the attention distribution and the model's performance and fairness. We then propose a novel method for modulating attention weights to improve model fairness after training. Since our method is only applied post-training and pre-inference, it is an intra-processing method and is, therefore, less computationally expensive than existing in-processing and pre-processing approaches. Our results show an increase in fairness and minimal performance loss on different text classification and generation tasks using language models of varying sizes. WARNING: This work uses language that is offensive.