Measuring Gender Bias in West Slavic Language Models

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Pre-trained language models have been known to perpetuate biases from the underlying datasets to downstream tasks. However, these findings are predominantly based on monolingual language models for English, whereas there are few investigative studies of biases encoded in language models for languages beyond English. In this paper, we fill this gap by analysing gender bias in West Slavic language models. We introduce the first template-based dataset in Czech, Polish, and Slovak for measuring gender bias towards male, female and non-binary subjects. We complete the sentences using both mono- and multilingual language models and assess their suitability for the masked language modelling objective. Next, we measure gender bias encoded in West Slavic language models by quantifying the toxicity and genderness of the generated words. We find that these language models produce hurtful completions that depend on the subject's gender. Perhaps surprisingly, Czech, Slovak, and Polish language models produce more hurtful completions with men as subjects, which, upon inspection, we find is due to completions being related to violence, death, and sickness.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEACL 2023 - 9th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the SlavicNLP 2023
Number of pages9
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2023
Pages146-154
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429579
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event9th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing, SlavicNLP 2023 - Dubrovnik, Croatia
Duration: 6 May 2023 → …

Conference

Conference9th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing, SlavicNLP 2023
LandCroatia
ByDubrovnik
Periode06/05/2023 → …

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Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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