Speciesist Language and Nonhuman Animal Bias in English Masked Language Models
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Various existing studies have analyzed what social biases are inherited by NLP models. These biases may directly or indirectly harm people, therefore previous studies have focused only on human attributes. If the social biases in NLP models can be indirectly harmful to humans involved, then the models can also indirectly harm nonhuman animals. However, until recently no research on social biases in NLP regarding nonhumans existed. In this paper, we analyze biases to nonhuman animals, i.e. speciesist bias, inherent in English Masked Language Models. We analyze this bias using template-based and corpus-extracted sentences which contain speciesist (or non-speciesist) language, to show that these models tend to associate harmful words with nonhuman animals. Our code for reproducing the experiments will be made available on GitHub.
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