BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering

It is well documented that NLP models learn social biases present in the world, but little work has been done to show how these biases manifest in actual model outputs for applied tasks like question answering (QA). We introduce the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ), a dataset consisting of question-sets constructed by the authors that highlight attested social biases against people belonging to protected classes along nine different social dimensions relevant for U.S. English-speaking contexts. Our task evaluates model responses at two distinct levels: (i) given an under-informative context, test how strongly model answers reflect social biases, and (ii) given an adequately informative context, test whether the model’s biases still override a correct answer choice. We find that models strongly rely on stereotypes when the context is ambiguous, meaning that the model’s outputs consistently reproduce harmful biases in this setting. Though models are much more accurate when the context provides an unambiguous answer, they still rely on stereotyped information and achieve an accuracy 2.5 percentage points higher on examples where the correct answer aligns with a social bias, with this accuracy difference widening to 5 points for examples targeting gender.