Global Voices, Local Biases: Socio-Cultural Prejudices across Languages
Anjishnu Mukherjee Chahat Raj Ziwei Zhu Antonios Anastasopoulos
Human biases are ubiquitous but not uniform: disparities exist across
linguistic, cultural, and societal borders. As large amounts of recent
literature suggest, language models (LMs) trained on human data can reflect and
often amplify the effects of these social biases. However, the vast majority of
existing studies on bias are heavily skewed towards Western and European
languages. In this work, we scale the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) to
24 languages, enabling broader studies and yielding interesting findings about
LM bias. We additionally enhance this data with culturally relevant information
for each language, capturing local contexts on a global scale. Further, to
encompass more widely prevalent societal biases, we examine new bias dimensions
across toxicity, ableism, and more. Moreover, we delve deeper into the Indian
linguistic landscape, conducting a comprehensive regional bias analysis across
six prevalent Indian languages. Finally, we highlight the significance of these
social biases and the new dimensions through an extensive comparison of
embedding methods, reinforcing the need to address them in pursuit of more
equitable language models. All code, data and results are available here:
https://github.com/iamshnoo/weathub.