arXiv Computation and Language

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Alignment Reduces Expressed but Not Encoded Gender Bias: A Unified Framework and Study

The paper introduces a unified framework that simultaneously measures intrinsic (encoded) and extrinsic (expressed) gender bias in large language models using identical neutral prompts. It finds a consistent link between latent gender information and output bias, but shows that alignment via supervised fine‑tuning reduces expressed bias while leaving internal gender associations largely intact and reactivatable by adversarial prompts. The study also demonstrates that debiasing gains on structured benchmarks may not transfer to realistic tasks such as story generation.

By Nour Bouchouchi, Thibault Laugel, Xavier Renard, Christophe Marsala, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Marcin Detyniecki
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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

Lower-Resource, Higher Scores: Language Bias in LLM Evaluators

The paper demonstrates that large language model (LLM) evaluators, whether reward‑model based or prompted LLM‑as‑a‑Judge, exhibit significant language bias in multilingual settings. Experiments with semantically identical instruction‑response pairs across 23 languages reveal that lower‑resource languages receive higher scores, a bias that persists across eight open‑weight evaluators and is not detectable by standard pairwise accuracy metrics. The authors link the bias to model uncertainty and language identity, showing it cannot be explained by content difficulty alone.

By Ej Zhou, Lucas Resck, Zheng Hui, Anna Korhonen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Evaluating Communicative Success in Machine-Translated Conversation

The paper introduces a three‑layer checklist-and-judge framework to evaluate interpreter agents that mediate live conversation across languages. It assesses semantic, pragmatic, and cultural‑social dimensions—naturalness, intent, and social appropriateness—rather than just fidelity, in both single‑turn and multi‑turn settings. Extensive validation shows that conventional MT metrics miss failures in stronger interpreters, and that context, structured instructions, and cultural cues influence communicative success.

By Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Alice Oh