Identifying and Mitigating Gender Bias in Social Media Sentiment Analysis: A Post-Training Approach on Example of the 2023 Morocco Earthquake

Sentiment analysis is a cornerstone in many contextual data analyses, from opinion mining to public discussion analysis. Gender bias is one of the well-known issues in sentiment analysis models, which can produce different results for the same text depending on the gender it refers to. This gender bias leads to further bias in other text analyses that use such sentiment analysis models. This study reviews existing solutions to reduce gender bias in sentiment analysis and proposes a new method to address this issue. The proposed method offers more practical flexibility as it focuses on sentiment estimation rather than model training. Furthermore, it provides a quantitative measure to investigate the gender bias in sentiment analysis results. The performance of the proposed method across five sentiment analysis models is presented using texts containing gender-specific words. The proposed method is applied to a set of social media posts related to Morocco’s 2023 earthquake to estimate the gender-unbiased sentiment of the posts and evaluate the gender-unbiasedness of five different sentiment analysis models in this context. The result shows that, although the sentiments estimated with different models are very different, the gender bias in none of the models is drastically large.