arXiv Machine Learning

Bridging the Language Gap in Scholarly Data II: Enhancing Gender Inference for Chinese Names

The paper presents new models for inferring gender from Chinese names, addressing the ambiguity inherent in Pinyin-only representations. Two hanzi-based models—a regression model producing a continuous gender score and a classification model yielding male, neutral, or female labels—are trained on Chinese-language physics publications and achieve high predictive accuracy. A Pinyin pipeline aggregates these hanzi predictions with transliteration and frequency weighting, adding an ambiguity score to flag unresolved cases, and outperforms existing tools by assigning gender to all names in an APS journal sample.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

How Humans and LLMs Read Gender into "Gender-Neutral" Physical Descriptions

The study introduces GAPA, a dataset of 316 physical attributes with 14,706 gender-association ratings from 304 US annotators, showing that such descriptions carry structured gender associations. It evaluates 16 LLMs, finding they partially mirror human ratings but exhibit biases such as compressed distributions, weaker alignment for men, and asymmetric abstention toward non‑binary identities. A proxy model trained on these data is released and applied to analyze character descriptions in LitBank, illustrating the persistence of gendered interpretations in ostensibly neutral language.

By Yingjia Wan, Lin Lin, Elisa Kreiss
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 15

Pre-Trained Language Models as Zero-Shot Tools for Social Science Research

The paper demonstrates that pre‑trained language models can perform record linkage and demographic inference from names without task‑specific training. EnsembleLink, an algorithm that combines pre‑trained embeddings with string‑based scorers, achieves performance comparable to or better than prior methods across diverse scripts and formats. Large language models reach up to 83.8% accuracy on U.S. voter files for ethnicity inference, surpassing name‑supplemented BISG and enabling inference for non‑U.S. ethnic categories while reducing bias in geographic racial gap estimates.

By Noah Dasanaike
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

When the Text Is Silent: Memory Shortcuts and the Validity of LLM Annotation under Evidence Insufficiency

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) rely on textual evidence or on their pre‑existing knowledge when annotating text. Using counterfactual prompts for 995 public figures, the authors find that LLMs often default to memory shortcuts—providing correct facts about a figure even when the text contains no supporting evidence. These shortcuts are amplified by evaluation design and incentives, but can be mitigated by name reminders or masking, though with trade‑offs in gender annotation.

By Wenchang Wang, Yue Song
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Fairness Beyond Anonymization? Demographic Leakage in German LLM-Generated Resumes

The study audits demographic leakage in German-language resumes generated by large language models. Using ChatGPT, Gemini, and Qwen 3 variants, the authors generate resumes from anonymized profiles, varying only gender- and ethnicity-associated names while keeping qualifications constant. Even after anonymization and gender-neutralization, classifiers can reliably distinguish male- from female-generated resumes, driven by subtle differences in gender-neutral terminology rather than overtly gendered wording; ethnicity-related leakage remains weak.

By Charlotte Leininger, Helena Veit, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Andreas Bender
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