metadata

title: Large Language Models for Detecting Bias in Job Descriptions.
emoji: 🌍
colorFrom: gray
colorTo: pink
sdk: static
pinned: false
license: apache-2.0
short_description: LLms for Detecting Bias in Job Descriptions.

Paper's Additional Material Section

Project's Summary

Abstract—This study explores the application of large language (LLM) models for detecting implicit bias in job descriptions, an important concern in human resources that shapes applicant pools and influences employer perception. We compare different LLM architectures—encoder, encoder-decoder, and decoder models—focusing on seven specific bias types. The research questions address the capability of foundation LLMs to detect implicit bias and the effectiveness of domain adaptation via fine-tuning versus prompt-tuning. Results indicate that fine-tuned models are more effective in detecting biases, with Flan-T5-XL emerging as the top performer, surpassing the zero-shot prompting of GPT-4o model. A labelled dataset consisting of verified gold-standard, silver-standard, and unverified bronze-standard data was created for this purpose and open-sourced to advance the field and serve as a valuable resource for future research.

Short Introduction

In human resources, bias affects both employers and employees in explicit and implicit forms. Explicit bias is conscious and controllable, but can be illegal in employment contexts. Implicit bias is subtle, unconscious, and harder to address. Implicit bias in job descriptions is a major concern as it shapes the applicant pool and influences applicants’ decisions. Bias in the language of job descriptions can affect how attractive a role appears to different individuals and can impact employer perception. The challenge is to efficiently identify and mitigate these biases.

The application of large language models (LLMs) for detecting bias in job descriptions is promising but underexplored. This study examines the effectiveness of various LLM architectures (encoder, encoder-decoder, decoder) less than 10 billion parameters in detecting implicit bias.

We conceptualise the task of identifying implicit bias in job descriptions as a multi-label classification problem, where each job description is assigned a subset of labels from a set of eight categories—age, disability, feminine, masculine, general exclusionary, racial, sexuality, and neutral. This study investigates two primary research questions:

Can foundation LLMs accurately detect implicit bias in job descriptions without specific task training? We evaluate the performance of three topical decoder-only models under four distinct prompt settings, assessing their ability to extract relevant information from job descriptions and identify implicit bias.
Does domain adaptation via fine-tuning foundational LLMs outperform prompt tuning for detecting implicit bias in job descriptions? We fine-tune models with varying architectures as text-classifiers on task-specific data and compare their performance to that of prompt-tuned models.

Model Architecture Overview

The models selected for our study are given.

Encoder Architecture:
- BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers): Developed by Google, BERT is designed to capture the context of words in search queries. Its architecture enables the model to learn contextualised representations of words by jointly conditioning on both left and right context.
- RoBERTa (A Robustly Optimised BERT Approach): Built on top of BERT’s architecture, RoBERTa is a variant developed by Facebook AI. RoBERTa introduces several key modifications, including longer training with larger batches, more data, and dynamic masking, which improves its performance and generalisation capabilities.
Encoder-Decoder Architecture: We selected one prominent encoder-decoder model, Flan-T5. Developed by Google, Flan-T5 combines the strengths of an encoder to understand input data and a decoder to generate relevant outputs. Additionally, Flan-T5 incorporates instruction fine-tuning, which enables the model to improve its performance and generalisation to unseen tasks.
Decoder Architecture: We selected three prominent decoder-based models, all of which are autoregressive models that generate text by predicting the next word in a sequence.
- Phi-3: Developed by Microsoft.
- LLama 3: Developed by Meta.
- Gemma 2: Developed by Google.

Additionally, OpenAI’s GPT-4 autoregressive model was used for several purposes in this study: data preprocessing, data augmentation, and as a prompting baseline

Baselines

Prompting Overview

We evaluated the instruction-tuned decoder models using four prompting approaches:

Zero-Shot (pZS): Models were prompted without providing examples and without task-specific training.
Few-Shot (pFS): Models were provided with a small number of example inputs and corresponding outputs, with the expectation that the model could generalise from these examples when given unseen inputs.
Chain-of-Thought (pCoT): Models were guided through a series of reasoning steps, with the expectation that breaking a complex problem into logical steps would enhance the reasoning performance. We utilised the Zero-Shot CoT method.
Self-Consistency (pSC): Multiple diverse outputs were generated for the same prompt, and the final answer was determined by selecting the most consistent response among these outputs. We applied three iterations of chain-of-thought reasoning with a majority vote for each label.

Evaluation

F1
Precision
Recall
Exact Match Ratio (EMR)

Dataset: Potential Job Description Bias Dataset


Potential Bias Terms found in Real Job Description Dataset (in Millions)

Dataset: Gold and Silver Samples


Annotated Samples: Bias vs Neutral


Annotated Samples by Bias Category

Results: Overall


Fine-Tuning vs Prompting Performance


Model Performance: Precision vs Recall

Results: By Bias Category


Top Performers’ Comparison Against Baseline Models


F1 Scores Across Various Categories and Experiments; Fine-Tuning (FT) and Prompting (PT)