Talk by Valentin Hofmann

16 December 2024, by DS Group

We are very excited that Valentin Hofmann will be giving a talk in our group.

Title:  Probing Covert Racism in Language Models Through the Lens of Dialect Prejudice

When: Monday, 16.12.2024 at 5pm

Abstract:
Language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgments biased in problematic ways about groups like African Americans. While prior research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models.

In this talk, I will present recent research showing that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice: they exhibit raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. I will talk about how these covert stereotypes are related to the attitudes that language models overtly display about African Americans, what harmful consequences they can have, and whether they are addressed by existing methods for alleviating racial bias in language models such as human feedback training. Finally, I will discuss how dialect prejudice affects the reasoning capabilities of language models.

Related papers: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5, https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11005