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:2504. 21259v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate imputation of race and ethnicity (R&E) is essential for fair lending compliance under ECOA, HMDA, and the Community Reinvestment Act, where up to 15% of mortgage applications carry missing race data and regulated institutions bear responsibility for identifying disparities on those records.
By S. Chalavadi, A. Pastor, T. Leitch
The study investigates cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) by testing their ability to perform author profiling—inferring singers’ gender and ethnicity—from song lyrics in a zero‑shot setting. Evaluating over 10,000 lyrics across several open‑source models, the authors find that most LLMs default toward North American ethnicity, while DeepSeek‑1.5B leans toward Asian ethnicity, and that Ministral‑8B exhibits the strongest ethnicity bias whereas Gemma‑12B is the most balanced. The paper introduces two fairness metrics, Modality Accuracy Divergence (MAD) and Recall Divergence (RD), to quantify these disparities and provides code and results publicly on GitHub and HuggingFace.
By Valentin Lafargue, Ariel Guerra-Adames, Emmanuelle Claeys, Elouan Vuichard, Jean-Michel Loubes
arXiv:2501. 02211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reproduce homogeneity bias -- the tendency to portray marginalized groups as more internally similar than dominant groups -- but whether this bias generalizes across models, is stable under different inference settings, or depends on how group identity is signaled remains unstudied.
By Messi H. J. Lee
arXiv:2501. 02211v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reproduce homogeneity bias -- the tendency to portray marginalized groups as more internally similar than dominant groups -- but whether this bias is stable or an artifact of inference settings has only been studied in single proprietary models.
By Messi H. J. Lee
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