Unintended Bias Detection and Mitigation in Misogynous Memes

Gitanjali Kumari, Anubhav Sinha, Asif Ekbal

Main: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics Oral Paper

Session 10: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics (Oral)
Conference Room: Marie Louise 2
Conference Time: March 20, 11:00-12:30 (CET) (Europe/Malta)
TLDR:
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Abstract: Online sexism has become a concerning issue in recent years, especially conveyed through memes. Although this alarming phenomenon has triggered many studies from computational linguistic and natural language processing points of view, less effort has been spent analyzing if those misogyny detection models are affected by an unintended bias. Such biases can lead models to incorrectly label non-misogynous memes misogynous due to specific identity terms, perpetuating harmful stereotypes and reinforcing negative attitudes. This paper presents the first and most comprehensive approach to measure and mitigate unintentional bias in the misogynous memes detection model, aiming to develop effective strategies to counter their harmful impact. Our proposed model, the \textbf{C}on\textbf{t}e\textbf{x}tualized \textbf{S}cene \textbf{G}raph-based \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{Net}work (CTXSGMNet), is an integrated architecture that combines VisualBERT, a CLIP-LSTM-based memory network, and an unbiased scene graph module with supervised contrastive loss, achieves state-of-the-art performance in mitigating unintentional bias in misogynous memes. Empirical evaluation, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis, demonstrates the effectiveness of our CTXSGMNet framework on the SemEval-2022 Task 5 (\textbf{MAMI} task) dataset, showcasing its promising performance in terms of Equity of Odds and F1 score. Additionally, we assess the generalizability of the proposed model by evaluating their performance on a few benchmark meme datasets, providing a comprehensive understanding of our approach's efficacy across diverse datasets.