Thesis Proposal: Auditing and Mitigating Demographic Bias in Multi-Stage Retrieval Systems for Criminal Justice Applications (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | racial descriptors alter embedding similarity scores and retrieval rankings, a new study shows . rife-specific biases can displace relevant records outside top-10 results, the study concludes . |
| Approach: | They propose to detect, measure, and mitigate racial bias in NLP systems deployed in criminal justice contexts . they propose to develop and evaluate debiasing techniques, validate synthetic findings on authentic law enforcement data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed research examines how bias propagates across retrieval pipelines . it shows that racial descriptors alter embedding similarity scores and retrieval rankings . |
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