Contrastive Clustering: Toward Unsupervised Bias Reduction for Emotion and Sentiment Classification

Background: When neural network emotion and sentiment classifiers are used in public health informatics studies, biases present in the classifiers could produce inadvertently misleading results. Objective: This study assesses the impact of bias on COVID-19 topics, and demonstrates an automatic algorithm for reducing bias when applied to COVID-19 social media texts. This could help public health informatics studies produce more timely results during crises, with a reduced risk of misleading results. Methods: Emotion and sentiment classifiers were applied to COVID-19 data before and after debiasing the classifiers using unsupervised contrastive clustering. Contrastive clustering approximates the degree to which tokens exhibit a causal versus correlational relationship with emotion or sentiment, by contrasting the tokens' relative salience to topics versus emotions or sentiments. Results: Contrastive clustering distinguishes correlation from causation for tokens with an F1 score of 0.753. Masking bias prone tokens from the classifier input decreases the classifier's overall F1 score by 0.02 (anger) and 0.033 (negative sentiment), but improves the F1 score for sentences annotated as bias prone by 0.155 (anger) and 0.103 (negative sentiment). Averaging across topics, debiasing reduces anger estimates by 14.4% and negative sentiment estimates by 8.0%. Conclusions: Contrastive clustering reduces algorithmic bias in emotion and sentiment classification for social media text pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health informatics studies should account for bias, due to its prevalence across a range of topics. Further research is needed to improve bias reduction techniques and to explore the adverse impact of bias on public health informatics analyses.