arXiv Computation and Language

From Language to Country to Valence: A Multilingual Audit of Stereotype Bias Across LLMs

The paper presents a multilingual audit of stereotype bias in large language models (LLMs) using 12,000 locally written Reddit posts in English, Spanish, French, and German. It evaluates gender, racial, and religious bias across six models (three open-weight and three proprietary APIs) with a two-blank design to reduce grammatical cues, finding that religion shows the highest imbalance, Spanish leads in gender bias, and German in race and religion. The study highlights that aggregate scores can mask category- and context-specific biases, underscoring the need for detailed inspection before deploying LLMs in consequential settings.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Evaluating and Mitigating Anti-LGBTQ Biases in German and Multilingual Language Models

The paper introduces a German-English benchmark dataset to evaluate anti‑LGBTQ biases in language models, combining community‑sourced stereotypes from German‑speaking queer individuals with a German translation of WinoQueer. Eight language models of varying sizes and architectures were assessed, revealing that they reproduce anti‑queer stereotypes with differences across identities and models. Fine‑tuning on community and progressive media content reduced bias on average, though the effect was not consistent across all models and identities.

By Melina Morch, Daniel Braun
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 19

Cultural (In)Competence: Investigating Culture-Specific Stereotype Detection Capabilities of LLMs

arXiv:2610.22545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stereotypes are subjective constructs that are mediated by the cultural context in which they are viewed. Successfully modeling them thus also requires...

By Maximilian Splieth\"over, Jannes L\"otfering, Dominik Bachmann, Alexander Espig, Willem Zuidema, Katrin Schulz, Henning Wachsmuth
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

MBBQ: A Dataset for Cross-Lingual Comparison of Stereotypes in Generative LLMs

MBBQ (Multilingual Bias Benchmark for Question-answering) is a curated extension of the English BBQ dataset that includes Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish, designed to measure stereotypes across these languages while controlling for cultural differences and task accuracy. The dataset also provides a parallel control set to assess question-answering performance independently of bias. Experiments with several open-source and proprietary LLMs show that non‑English languages can exhibit greater bias than English, and cross‑lingual bias differences persist except in the most accurate models.

By Vera Neplenbroek, Arianna Bisazza, Raquel Fern\'andez
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Benchmarking Gender Bias in Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics across Occupations

The paper investigates gender bias in machine translation evaluation metrics using an occupation-balanced subset of GAMBIT+ across seven English‑source language pairs, including a new German extension. It finds that masculine translations tend to receive higher scores and that biases align with stereotypical gender representations, though the strength varies by evaluator and language. The study highlights that assessing bias requires multiple dimensions beyond a single aggregate measure.

By Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Giorgos Filandrianos, Wafaa Mohammed, Giuseppe Attanasio, Chrysoula Zerva
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

WinoQueer-NL: Assessing Bias in Dutch Language Models toward LGBTQ+ Identities

The paper introduces WinoQueer-NL, a Dutch adaptation of the English WinoQueer benchmark, designed to assess anti‑queer bias in Dutch language models. After validating the dataset with 43 queer Dutch participants, the authors expanded it to 42,906 sentences and evaluated several Dutch and multilingual models, finding that while overall bias scores appeared neutral, specific identities—particularly transgender and non‑binary—were disproportionately favored in stereotypical sentences. The study underscores the need for culturally grounded datasets to identify and mitigate biases that affect marginalized groups in Dutch NLP systems.

By Jiska Beuk, Gerasimos Spanakis
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Beyond Surface Cues: Disentangling Sociocultural Signals in Multilingual LLMs

The study examines how multilingual large language models (LLMs) produce outputs that differ across sociocultural contexts, highlighting that identity labels and source-language cues can mislead assessments of cultural grounding. Using a human‑validated, multi‑agent audit on 89,253 outputs from 12 LLMs in English, French, and Chinese across 18 occupations and three task conditions, the authors find that bias representation varies systematically by language and task. Removing direct identity cues reduces identity‑label prediction in English and Chinese but not in French, and the source language’s cultural context consistently receives the highest relevance score, though this signal weakens after translation or name masking. "whyItMatters":"The findings show that surface cues can obscure true cross‑cultural patterns, underscoring the need for careful audit designs to avoid misleading conclusions about bias in multilingual LLMs."

By Yuanjun Feng, Tanzhou Liu, Stefan Feuerriegel, Yash Raj Shrestha
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

GPTBIAS: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Bias in Large Language Models

The paper introduces GPTBIAS, a framework that uses powerful large language models like GPT‑4 to evaluate bias in other LLMs. It employs specially crafted prompts called Bias Attack Instructions to probe for bias and outputs a bias score along with detailed information such as bias types, affected demographics, keywords, reasons, and improvement suggestions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness and usability.

By Jiaxu Zhao, Meng Fang, Shirui Pan, Wenpeng Yin, Mykola Pechenizkiy
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

Name-Bias in Large Language Models

The study evaluates name-based bias in six local large language models using a fill-in-the-blank task with first names from U.S. Social Security and a race classification dataset. Across 300,000 responses, the models consistently favored names that were less stereotypically male, older, popular, and white, with gender bias being the strongest effect. The bias varied with sentence context but remained significant, underscoring the persistence of name bias in local LLMs.

By Kalyan Bhetwal, Ceren Mert, Ian Whitehouse