Austria

In recent years, various methods have been proposed to evaluate gender bias in large language models (LLMs). A key challenge lies in the transferability of bias measurement methods initially developed for the English language when applied to other languages. This work aims to contribute to this research strand by presenting five German datasets for gender bias evaluation in LLMs. The datasets are grounded in well-established concepts of gender bias and are accessible through multiple methodologies. Our findings, reported for eight multilingual LLM models, reveal unique challenges associated with gender bias in German, including the ambiguous interpretation of male occupational terms and the influence of seemingly neutral nouns on gender perception. This work contributes to the understanding of gender bias in LLMs across languages and underscores the necessity for tailored evaluation frameworks.

ACL 2025

Exploring Gender Bias in Large Language Models: An In-depth Dive into the German Language

workshop paper

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Reporting bias is the tendency for speakers to omit unnecessary or obvious information while mentioning things they consider relevant or surprising. In descriptions of people, reporting bias can manifest as a tendency to over report on attributes that deviate from the norm. While social bias in language models has garnered a lot of attention in recent years, a majority of the existing work equates "bias" with "stereotypes". We suggest reporting bias as an alternative lens through which to study how social attitudes manifest in language models. We present the MARB dataset, a diagnostic dataset for studying the interaction between social bias and reporting bias in language models. We use MARB to evaluate the off-the-shelf behavior of both masked and autoregressive language models and find signs of reporting bias with regards to marginalized identities, mirroring that which can be found in human text. This effect is particularly pronounced when taking gender into account, demonstrating the importance of considering intersectionality when studying social phenomena like biases.

Introducing MARB — A Dataset for Studying the Social Dimensions of Reporting Bias in Language Models

Gender-inclusive language is often used with the aim of ensuring that all individuals, regardless of gender, can be associated with certain concepts. While psycholinguistic studies have examined its effects in relation to human cognition, it remains unclear how Large Language Models (LLMs) process gender-inclusive language. Given that commercial LLMs are gaining an increasingly strong foothold in everyday applications, it is crucial to examine whether LLMs in fact interpret gender-inclusive language neutrally, because the language they generate has the potential to influence the language of their users. This study examines whether LLM-generated coreferent terms align with a given gender expression or reflect model biases. Adapting psycholinguistic methods from French to English and German, we find that in English, LLMs generally maintain the antecedent’s gender but exhibit underlying masculine bias. In German, this bias is much stronger, overriding all tested gender-neutralization strategies.

Adapting Psycholinguistic Research for LLMs: Gender-inclusive Language in a Coreference Context

Bias in Nepali NLP is rarely addressed, as the language is classified as low-resource, which leads to the perpetuation of biases in downstream systems. Our research focuses on gender bias in Nepali-English machine translation, an area that has seen little exploration. With the emergence of Large Language Models(LLM), there is a unique opportunity to mitigate these biases. In this study, we quantify and evaluate gender bias by constructing an occupation corpus and adapting three gender-bias challenge sets for Nepali. Our findings reveal that gender bias is prevalent in existing translation systems, with translations often reinforcing stereotypes and misrepresenting gender-specific roles. However, LLMs perform significantly better in both gender-neutral and gender-specific contexts, demonstrating less bias compared to traditional machine translation systems. Despite some quirks, LLMs offer a promising alternative for culture-rich, low-resource languages like Nepali. We also explore how LLMs can improve gender accuracy and mitigate biases in occupational terms, providing a more equitable translation experience. Our work contributes to the growing effort to reduce biases in machine translation and highlights the potential of LLMs to address bias in low-resource languages, paving the way for more inclusive and accurate translation systems.

Gender Bias in Nepali-English Machine Translation: A Comparison of LLMs and Existing MT Systems

Large language models (LLMs) often inherit and amplify social biases embedded in their training data. A prominent social bias is gender bias. In this regard, prior work has mainly focused on gender stereotyping bias – the association of specific roles or traits with a particular gender – in English and on evaluating gender bias in model embeddings or generated outputs. In contrast, gender representation bias – the unequal frequency of references to individuals of different genders – in the training corpora has received less attention. Yet such imbalances in the training data constitute an upstream source of bias that can propagate and intensify throughout the entire model lifecycle. To fill this gap, we propose a novel LLM-based method to detect and quantify gender representation bias in LLM training data in gendered languages, where grammatical gender challenges the applicability of methods developed for English. By leveraging the LLMs' contextual understanding, our approach automatically identifies and classifies person-referencing words in gendered language corpora. Applied to four Spanish-English benchmarks and five Valencian corpora, our method reveals substantial male-dominant imbalances. We show that such biases in training data affect model outputs, but can surprisingly be mitigated leveraging small-scale training on datasets that are biased towards the opposite gender. Our findings highlight the need for corpus-level gender bias analysis in multilingual NLP. We make our code and data publicly available.

Leveraging Large Language Models to Measure Gender Representation Bias in Gendered Language Corpora

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising alternatives to traditional occupational coding approaches in survey research. Using a German dataset, we examine the extent to which LLM-based occupational coding differs by gender. Our findings reveal systematic disparities: gendered job titles (e.g., “Autor” vs. “Autorin”, meaning “male author” vs. “female author”) frequently result in diverging occupation codes, even when semantically identical. Across all models, 54%–82% of gendered inputs obtain different Top-5 suggestions. The practical impact, however, depends on the model. GPT includes the correct code most often (62%) but demonstrates female bias (up to +18 pp). IBM is less accurate (51%) but largely balanced. Alibaba, Gemini, and MiniLM achieve about 50% correct-code inclusion, and their small (< 10 pp) and direction-flipping gaps could indicate a sampling noise rather than gender bias. We discuss these findings in the context of fairness and reproducibility in NLP applications for social data.

Mind the Gap: Gender-based Differences in Occupational Embeddings

Social bias in language models can potentially exacerbate social inequalities. Despite it having garnered wide attention, most research focuses on English data. In a low-resource scenario, the models often perform worse due to insufficient training data. This study aims to leverage high-resource language corpora to evaluate bias and experiment with debiasing methods in low-resource languages. We evaluated the performance of recent multilingual models in five languages: English (\textsc{eng}), Chinese (\textsc{zho}), Russian (\textsc{rus}), Indonesian (\textsc{ind}) and Thai (\textsc{tha}), and analyzed four bias dimensions: \textit{gender}, \textit{religion}, \textit{nationality}, and \textit{race-color}. By constructing multilingual bias evaluation datasets, this study allows fair comparisons between models across languages. We have further investigated three debiasing methods-\texttt{CDA}, \texttt{Dropout}, \texttt{SenDeb}-and demonstrated that debiasing methods from high-resource languages can be effectively transferred to low-resource ones, providing actionable insights for fairness research in multilingual NLP.

Bias Beyond English: Evaluating Social Bias and Debiasing Methods in a Low-Resource Setting

Understanding the sources of variability in annotations is crucial for developing fair NLP systems, especially for tasks like sexism detection where demographic bias is a concern. This study investigates the extent to which annotator demographic features influence labeling decisions compared to text content. Using a Generalized Linear Mixed Model, we quantify this influence, finding that while statistically present, demographic factors account for a minor fraction (~8%) of the observed variance, with tweet content being the dominant factor. We then assess the reliability of Generative AI (GenAI) models as annotators, specifically evaluating if guiding them with demographic personas improves alignment with human judgments. Our results indicate that simplistic persona prompting often fails to enhance, and sometimes degrades, performance compared to baseline models. Furthermore, explainable AI (XAI) techniques reveal that model predictions rely heavily on content-specific tokens related to sexism, rather than correlates of demographic characteristics. We argue that focusing on content-driven explanations and robust annotation protocols offers a more reliable path towards fairness than potentially persona simulation.

Assessing the Reliability of LLMs Annotations in the Context of Demographic Bias and Model Explanation

This paper presents WoNBias, a curated Bengali dataset to identify gender-based biases, stereotypes, and harmful language directed at women. It merges digital sources- social media, blogs, news- with offline tactics comprising surveys and focus groups, alongside some existing corpora to compile a total of 31,484 entries (10,656 negative; 10,170 positive; 10,658 neutral). WoNBias reflects the sociocultural subtleties of bias in both Bengali digital and offline conversations. By bridging online and offline biased contexts, the dataset supports content moderation, policy interventions, and equitable NLP research for Bengali, a low-resource language critically underserved by existing tools. WoNBias aims to combat systemic gender discrimination against women on digital platforms, empowering researchers and practitioners to combat harmful narratives in Bengali-speaking communities.

WoNBias: A Dataset for Classifying Bias & Prejudice Against Women in Bengali Text

Vision-language models (VLMs) can achieve high accuracy in medical applications but can retain demographic biases from training data. While multiple works have identified the presence of these biases in many VLMs, it remains unclear how strong their impact at the inference level is. In this work, we study how well a task-level explainability method based on linear combinations of words can detect multiple types of biases, with a focus on medical image classification. By manipulating the training datasets with demographic and non-demographic biases, we show how the adopted approach can detect explicitly encoded biases but fails with implicitly encoded ones, particularly biological sex. Our results suggest that such a failure likely stems from misalignment between sex-describing features in image versus text modalities. Our findings highlight limitations in the evaluated explainability method for detecting implicit biases in medical VLMs.

Strengths and Limitations of Word-Based Task Explainability in Vision Language Models: a Case Study on Biological Sex Biases in the Medical Domain

The widespread use of language models, especially Large Language Models, paired with their inherent biases can propagate and amplify societal inequalities. 
While research has extensively explored methods for bias mitigation and measurement, limited attention has been paid to how such biases are communicated to users, which instead can have a positive impact on increasing user trust and understanding of these models. 
Our study addresses this gap by investigating user preferences for gender bias mitigation, measurement and communication in language models. 
To this end, we conducted a user study targeting female AI practitioners with eighteen female and one male participant. 
Our findings reveal that user preferences for bias mitigation and measurement show strong consensus, whereas they vary widely for bias communication, underscoring the importance of tailoring warnings to individual needs.
Building on these findings, we propose a framework for user-centred bias reporting, which leverages runtime monitoring techniques to assess and visualise bias in real time and in a customizable fashion.

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Introducing MARB — A Dataset for Studying the Social Dimensions of Reporting Bias in Language Models

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