Gender and racial fairness in depression research using social media

Carlos Aguirre, Keith Harrigian, Mark Dredze

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Multiple studies have demonstrated that behavior on internet-based social media platforms can be indicative of an individual's mental health status. The widespread availability of such data has spurred interest in mental health research from a computational lens. While previous research has raised concerns about possible biases in models produced from this data, no study has quantified how these biases actually manifest themselves with respect to different demographic groups, such as gender and racial/ethnic groups. Here, we analyze the fairness of depression classifiers trained on Twitter data with respect to gender and racial demographic groups. We find that model performance systematically differs for underrepresented groups and that these discrepancies cannot be fully explained by trivial data representation issues. Our study concludes with recommendations on how to avoid these biases in future research.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEACL 2021 - 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages2932-2949
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085022
StatePublished - 2021
Event16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Associationfor Computational Linguistics, EACL 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Apr 19 2021Apr 23 2021

Publication series

NameEACL 2021 - 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Associationfor Computational Linguistics, EACL 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period4/19/214/23/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Linguistics and Language

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