How to Write a Bias Statement: Recommendations for Submissions to the Workshop on Gender Bias in NLP

Christian Hardmeier
Marta R. Costa-jussà
Will Radford
Su Lin Blodgett
arXiv (2020)

Abstract

At the Workshop on Gender Bias in NLP (GeBNLP), we'd like to encourage
authors to give explicit consideration to the wider aspects of bias and its
social implications. For the 2020 edition of the workshop, we therefore
requested that all authors include an explicit \emph{bias statement} in their
work to clarify how their work relates to the social context in which NLP
systems are used.

The programme committee of the workshops included a number of
reviewers with a background in the humanities and social sciences, in addition
to NLP experts doing the bulk of the reviewing. Each paper was assigned one of
those reviewers, and they were asked to pay specific attention to the provided
bias statements in their reviews. This initiative was well received by the
authors who submitted papers to the workshop, several of whom said they received
useful suggestions and literature hints from the bias reviewers. We are
therefore planning to keep this feature of the review process in future editions
of the workshop.

This document was originally published as a blog post on the
web site of GeBNLP 2020.