IP Library › Granted Patent US 12,229,509
Granted Patent B2
US 12,229,509 · App. 17/233,727 · Granted Feb 18, 2025

Contextual impact adjustment for machine learning models

Inventors: Naveen Panwar (Bangalore, IN); Nishtha Madaan (Gurgaon, IN); Deepak Vijaykeerthy (Bangalore, IN); Pranay Kumar Lohia (Bhagalpur, IN); Diptikalyan Saha (Bangalore, IN)
Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
G06F40/279G06F18/2431G06N3/045G06N3/08
View Patent ↗
Loading inventors, assignments & file history…
Monitor This Case
Get email alerts when status or documents change.
Order Certified Copies
Most orders are placed with the USPTO same day — all within 24 business hours.
Order via The Patent Place →
Pre-filled with this patent's details
Quick Facts
Patent No.
US 12,229,509
App. No.
17/233,727
Granted
Feb 18, 2025
Kind
B2
Abstract

Methods, systems, and computer program products for detecting contextual bias in text are provided herein. A computer-implemented method includes identifying, by a machine learning network, a protected attribute in one or more data samples; processing the identified data samples using a first sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the first sub-network is configured to determine a plurality of contexts of the protected attribute across the identified data samples; determining an impact of each of the plurality of contexts on a second sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the second sub-network of the machine learning network is configured to classify a given data sample into one of a plurality of classes; and adjusting the second sub-network of the machine learning to account for the impact of at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network.

Claims (45)

1. A computer-implemented method, the method comprising:

identifying, by a machine learning network, a plurality of data samples comprising a protected attribute;

processing the identified data samples using a first sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the first sub-network is configured to determine information corresponding to a plurality of contexts of the protected attribute across the identified data samples, wherein each of the plurality of contexts corresponds to a different meaning associated with the protected attribute;

determining respective impacts of the plurality of contexts on a second sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the second sub-network of the machine learning network is configured to classify a given data sample into one of a plurality of classes; and

adjusting the second sub-network of the machine learning network to account for the impact corresponding to at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network;

wherein the method is carried out by at least one computing device.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the first sub-network is implemented as a residual connection in the machine learning network.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 2 , wherein the first sub-network comprises a multi-head attention residual network.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the second sub-network comprises a feature learning neural network.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , comprising:

generating and outputting an explanation of the impact corresponding to the at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein each of the data samples comprises a sequence of text, and wherein the protected attribute corresponds to a portion of the sequence of text.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein at least one of:

the relevance of different portions of the given one of the identified data samples to the portion of the given identified data sample is based on an attention computed for the given one of the identified data samples; and

the information comprises weights assigned by the first sub-network to the respective identified samples.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 7 , wherein said processing comprises:

aggregating the information for the identified data samples based on at least one of: frequencies of types of associations and the assigned weights.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the machine learning network is trained on a first set of training data, and wherein said adjusting comprises:

retraining the machine learning network using a second set of training data that reduces the impact of at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network relative to the first set of training data.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein software is provided as a service in a cloud environment.

11. A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by a computing device to cause the computing device to:

identify, by a machine learning network, a plurality of data samples comprising a protected attribute;

process the identified data samples using a first sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the first sub-network is configured to determine information corresponding to a plurality of contexts of the protected attribute across the identified data samples, wherein each of the plurality of contexts corresponds to a different meaning associated with the protected attribute;

determine respective impacts of the plurality of contexts on a second sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the second sub-network of the machine learning network is configured to classify a given data sample into one of a plurality of classes; and

adjust the second sub-network of the machine learning network to account for the impact corresponding to at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network.

12. The computer program product of claim 11 , wherein the first sub-network is implemented as a residual connection in the machine learning network.

13. The computer program product of claim 12 , wherein the first sub-network comprises a multi-head attention residual network.

14. The computer program product of claim 11 , wherein the second sub-network comprises a feature learning neural network.

15. The computer program product of claim 11 , wherein the program instructions executable by the computing device cause the computing device to:

generate and output an explanation corresponding to the impact of the at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network.

16. The computer program product of claim 11 , wherein each of the data samples comprises a sequence of text, and wherein the protected attribute corresponds to a portion of the sequence of text.

17. The computer program product of claim 11 , wherein at least one of:

the relevance of different portions of the given one of the identified data samples to the portion of the given identified data sample is based on an attention computed for the given one of the identified data samples; and

the information comprises weights assigned by the first sub-network to the respective identified samples.

18. The computer program product of claim 17 , wherein said processing comprises:

aggregating the information for the identified data samples based on at least one of: frequencies of types of associations and the assigned weights.

19. The computer program product of claim 11 , wherein the machine learning network is trained on a first set of training data, and wherein said adjusting comprises:

retraining the machine learning network using a second set of training data that reduces the impact of at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network relative to the first set of training data.

20. A system comprising:

a memory configured to store program instructions;

a processor operatively coupled to the memory to execute the program instructions to:

identify, by a machine learning network, a plurality of data samples comprising a protected attribute;

process the identified data samples using a first sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the first sub-network is configured to determine information corresponding to a plurality of contexts of the protected attribute across the identified data samples, wherein each of the plurality of contexts corresponds to a different meaning associated with the protected attribute;

determine respective impacts of the plurality of contexts on a second sub-network of the machine learning network, wherein the second sub-network of the machine learning network is configured to classify a given data sample into one of a plurality of classes; and

adjust the second sub-network of the machine learning network to account for the impact corresponding to at least one of the plurality of contexts on the second sub-network.

Assignments (1)
ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST Recorded Apr 19, 2021
From: PANWAR, NAVEEN; MADAAN, NISHTHA; VIJAYKEERTHY, DEEPAK; LOHIA, PRANAY KUMAR; SAHA, DIPTIKALYAN
To: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
Reel/Frame 055956/0513 →
Continuity (1)
Related Publication 20220335217A1 · Oct 20, 2022
References Cited (17)
US 20180246873A1 · Latapie · 2018 [cited by examiner]
CN 111079532B · 2021 [cited by examiner]
CN 108664632B · 2021 [cited by examiner]
Mehta, et al., “WEClustering: word embeddings based text clustering technique for large datasets,” Complex & Intelligent Systems, Apr. 2021. (Year: 2021). [cited by examiner]
Zhang, et al. “Hurtful Words: Quantifying Biases in Clinical Contextual Word embeddings, ” ACM, 2020. (Year: 2020). [cited by examiner]
Mehta, et al., “WEClustering: word embeddings based text clustering technique for large datasets, ” Complex & Intelligent Systems, Apr. 2021. (see previous Office action attachment) (Year: 2021). [cited by examiner]
Mehta, et al., “WEClustering: word embeddings based text clustering technique for large datasets,” Complex & Intelligent Systems, Apr. 2021—see attached reference in the first Office action. (Year: 2021). [cited by examiner]
Vaswani, Ashish, et al. “Attention is all you need.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762 (2017). [cited by applicant]
Sun, Tony, et al. “Mitigating gender bias in natural language processing: Literature review.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.08976 (2019). [cited by applicant]
Bolukbasi, Tolga, et al. “Man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker? Debiasing word embeddings.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.06520 (2016). [cited by applicant]
Zhao, Jieyu, et al. “Men also like shopping: Reducing gender bias amplification using corpus-level constraints.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.09457 (2017). [cited by applicant]
Tan, Yi Chern, and L. Elisa Celis. “Assessing social and intersectional biases in contextualized word representations.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.01485 (2019). [cited by applicant]
Kuang, Sicong, and Brian D. Davison. “Semantic and context-aware linguistic model for bias detection.” Proc. of the Natural Language Processing meets Journalism IJCAI-16 Workshop. 2016. [cited by applicant]
Zhang, Haoran, et al. “Hurtful words: quantifying biases in clinical contextual word embeddings.” proceedings of the ACM Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning. 2020. [cited by applicant]
Recasens, Marta, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Dan Jurafsky. “Linguistic models for analyzing and detecting biased language.” Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguisti… [cited by applicant]
Díaz, Mark, et al. “Addressing age-related bias in sentiment analysis.” Proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. 2018. [cited by applicant]
Mell, Peter, et al., The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST Special Publication 800-145, Sep. 2011. [cited by applicant]