The Guardian view on computers and language: reproducing bias | Editorial

The English language is full of value judgments. These are taken over by the computer algorithms that use it. What can we do about these unconscious biases?

"Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions," wrote David Hume. Language, our instrument of reason, is saturated with value judgments. So what happens when computers - apparently the embodiment of pure mathematical rationality - start to use human language? They reproduce the traces of our passions, of course.

A thorough and elegant experiment reported in the journal Science this week shows this clearly. Researchers analysed a gigantic collection of English texts - more than 840bn instances of 2.3m words - and expressed mathematically how likely different words are to appear in the same contexts. This captures the largely unconscious web of associations around any given word with greater subtlety and fidelity than dictionary definitions can do, since people use words with much greater confidence than they can define them.

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