VIB - Visualizing and Interpreting Bias

Requirements

Python 3.6+, pip

The web interface is supported only for Chrome and Firefox.

The following libraries are also required to run the code:

flask
sklearn
scipy
numpy
tqdm
gensim

To install these libraries using pip, use the following command in the terminal:

pip3 install flask scikit-learn scipy numpy pandas tqdm gensim

To install these packages only for current user (or if you do not write access to the python installation on the machine):

pip3 install flask scikit-learn scipy numpy pandas tqdm gensim --user

Alternately, you can also use conda to install the packages:

conda install flask scikit-learn scipy numpy pandas tqdm gensim

Dataset

You need to download the dataset from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ni_1yWWC4n6c6dTvauOPhV8aPbHRMLlK and replace the contents of the dummy data folder present here from the contents of data folder present in the above google drive link.

Installation

Clone this repository to your local machine, make sure the requirements are installed on your machine. Then update the contents of the data folder Then navigate to the cloned repository and in the base directory, type the following command in the terminal.

git clone https://github.com/grvmishra788/VIB.git
# Update contents o `data` folder
cd VIB
python3 -m flask run

Once the command above is running, open your web browser (Chrome and Firefox supported) and navigate to: http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (or equivalently to: http://localhost:5000)

Common installation issues and fixes

Error: Could not locate a Flask application on command python -m flask run

If you get the following error, it might indicate that you are not in the correct directory. Open a terminal in the base directory of the cloned repository.

Error: Could not locate a Flask application. You did not provide the
"FLASK_APP" environment variable, and a "wsgi.py" or "app.py" module
was not found in the current directory

Python version

The tool is written with Python 3.6+ support, and may/may not work with earlier versions of Python3.x. Python 2.x. is not supported.

Missing libraries

Make sure you install the requirements before running the application.

Application runs but UI is mangled in the browser

We have tested the tool on Firefox and Chrome. There are known issues of point labels not showing correctly in Safari.

I get the following error: "Something went wrong! Could not find the key 'xxxx'

This error means that one of the words (denoted by 'xxxx' above) in your provided word set was not found the vocabulary of the word vector embedding. Check the spelling, or use another common word instead.