Is it possible to use natural language to intervene in a models behavior and alter its prediction in a desired way? We investigate the effectiveness of natural language interventions for reading-comprehension systems, studying this in the context of social stereotypes. Specifically, we propose a new language understanding task, Linguistic Ethical Interventions (LEI), where the goal is to amend a question-answering (QA) models unethical behavior by communicating context-specific principles of ethics and equity to it. To this end, we build upon recent methods for quantifying a systems social stereotypes, augmenting them with different kinds of ethical interventions and the desired model behavior under such interventions. Our zero-shot evaluation finds that even todays powerful neural language models are extremely poor ethical-advice takers, that is, they respond surprisingly little to ethical interventions even though these interventions are stated as simple sentences. Few-shot learning improves model behavior but remains far from the desired outcome, especially when evaluated for various types of generalization. Our new task thus poses a novel language understanding challenge for the community.
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