Cited by 31Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesEthics and Social Impacts of AI

When Do Pre-Training Biases Propagate to Downstream Tasks? A Case Study in Text Summarization

Open access
Ladhak, Faisal, Durmus, Esin, Suzgun, Mirac, Zhang, Tianyi, Jurafsky, Dan, McKeown, Kathleen, Hashimoto, Tatsunori·2023·Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Faisal Ladhak, Esin Durmus, Mirac Suzgun, Tianyi Zhang, Dan Jurafsky, Kathleen McKeown, Tatsunori Hashimoto. Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2023.

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Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.234

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  • Such biases can be inadvertently acquired from internet-based texts and subsequently be propagated into the generated content.

    “Such biases can be inadvertently acquired from internet-based texts, which are rife with diverse and biased viewpoints, and subsequently be propagated into the generated content [155].”

    From A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions (2025) · cites this paper as [155]

    The Abstract and §6 Discussion report that pre-training biases can propagate into generated summaries as hallucinated facts. But §6 leaves the source of those biases for future work and treats stereotyping in pre-training data as one possibility; it does not establish that they were acquired from internet-based texts. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Certain biases are intrinsically tied to hallucinations, especially those related to gender and nationality.

    “However, certain biases are intrinsically tied to hallucinations, especially those related to gender [242] and nationality [155, 226].”

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Tolga Bolukbasi, Kai-Wei Chang, James Zou, Venkatesh Saligrama, and Adam Kalai. 2016. Man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker? debiasing word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS'16, page 4356-4364, Red Hook, NY, USA.

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Authors
Ladhak, F., Durmus, E., Suzgun, M., Zhang, T., Jurafsky, D., McKeown, K., & Hashimoto, T.
Affiliations
  • Columbia University (US)
  • Stanford University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2023
Pages
3206-3219
OpenAlex
W4386566641
Cited by
30
References
51
Citations by year
2026: 5 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 4
FWCI
5.33
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
  • Office of the Director of National Intelligence
  • Open Philanthropy Project
  • Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Keywords
bias propagation, text summarization, downstream tasks, pre-trained language models, bias in language models

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