Disembodied Machine Learning: On the Illusion of Objectivity in NLP

Understand

Machine Learning seeks to identify and encode bodies of knowledge within provided datasets.

• However, data encodes subjective content, which determines the possible outcomes of the models trained on it.
• Because such subjectivity enables marginalisation of parts of society, it is termed (social) `bias' and sought to be removed.
• In this paper, we contextualise this discourse of bias in the ML community against the subjective choices in the development process.