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This work presents a comprehensive approach to reduce bias in word embedding vectors and evaluate the impact on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Two GloVe variations (840B and 50) are debiased by identifying the gender direction in the word embedding space and then removing or reducing the gender component from the embeddings of target words, while preserving useful semantic information. Their gender bias is assessed through the Word Embedding Association Test. The performance of co-reference resolution and text classification models trained on both original and debiased embeddings is evaluated in terms of accuracy. A compressed co-reference resolution model is examined to gauge the effectiveness of debiasing techniques on resource-efficient models. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply compression techniques to debiased models. By analyzing the context preservation of debiased embeddings using a Twitter misinformation dataset, this study contributes valuable insights into the practical implications of debiasing methods for real-world applications such as person profiling., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Methods on modelling the human brain as a Complex System have increased remarkably in the literature as researchers seek to understand the underlying foundations behind cognition, behaviour, and perception. Computational methods, especially Graph Theory-based methods, have recently contributed significantly in understanding the wiring connectivity of the brain, modelling it as a set of nodes connected by edges. Therefore, the brain's spatiotemporal dynamics can be holistically studied by considering a network, which consists of many neurons, represented by nodes. Various models have been proposed for modelling such neurons. A recently proposed method in training such networks, called full-Force, produces networks that perform tasks with fewer neurons and greater noise robustness than previous least-squares approaches (i.e. FORCE method). In this paper, the first direct applicability of a variant of the full-Force method to biologically-motivated Spiking RNNs (SRNNs) is demonstrated. The SRNN is a graph consisting of modules. Each module is modelled as a Small-World Network (SWN), which is a specific type of a biologically-plausible graph. So, the first direct applicability of a variant of the full-Force method to modular SWNs is demonstrated, evaluated through regression and information theoretic metrics. For the first time, the aforementioned method is applied to spiking neuron models and trained on various real-life Electroencephalography (EEG) signals. To the best of the authors' knowledge, all the contributions of this paper are novel. Results show that trained SRNNs match EEG signals almost perfectly, while network dynamics can mimic the target dynamics. This demonstrates that the holistic setup of the network model and the neuron model which are both more biologically plausible than previous work, can be tuned into real biological signal dynamics., (© 2022. The Author(s).)