Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance

Objectivity is a goal for Wikipedia and many news sites, as well as a guiding principle of many large language models. Indeed, several methods have recently been developed for automatic subjective bias neutralization. These methods, however, typically rely on parallel text for training (i.e. a biased sentence coupled with a non-biased sentence), demonstrate poor transfer to new domains, and can lose important bias-independent context. Toward expanding the reach of bias neutralization, we propose in this paper a new approach called FairBalance. Three of its unique features are: i) a cycle consistent adversarial network enables bias neutralization without the need for parallel text; ii) the model design preserves bias-independent content; and iii) through auxiliary guidance, the model highlights sequences of bias-inducing words, yielding strong results in terms of bias neutralization quality. In our evaluations involving seven models comprising of adversarial and non-adversarial models, the FairBalance method showed a notable improvement in bias neutralization based on subjective human judgment when compared to other techniques.