explosion / explosion/spaCy

docs: document speciesist bias in word vectors and NLP models

Open
#13,926 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Python
Stars
33.9k
Forks
4.7k
Avg merge
3m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

## Proposal

Document speciesist bias as a recognized form of bias in spaCy's documentation, particularly in sections about word vectors and model evaluation.

## Context

Peer-reviewed research has demonstrated that word embeddings and NLP models — the foundation of spaCy's pipeline — encode speciesist associations:

- **Takeshita et al. (2022).** "Speciesist language and nonhuman animal bias in English masked language models." *Information Processing & Management*. Found BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT all associate harmful words with nonhuman animals.
- **Hagendorff et al. (2023).** "Speciesist bias in AI." *AI and Ethics*. Documented speciesist bias across image recognition, word embeddings, and language models.
- **Leach et al. (2023).** Large-scale word embedding analysis establishing anthropocentric speciesism in everyday language. *British Journal of Social Psychology*.

## Relevance to spaCy

- **Word vectors** (en_core_web_md, en_core_web_lg): Pre-trained vectors inherit speciesist associations from training corpora.
- **NER**: Named entity models trained on biased corpora may treat animal-related entities differently
- **Text classification**: Downstream models built on spaCy inherit these biases
- **Sentiment**: spaCy-based sentiment pipelines reflect speciesist patterns in training data

## Suggested Change

A brief note in the word vectors or model evaluation documentation acknowledging speciesist bias as a documented phenomenon, with citations. This aligns with spaCy's existing documentation on model limitations and biases.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.