This Land is {Your, My} Land: Evaluating Geopolitical Biases in Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Bryan, Haider, Samar, Callison-Burch, Chris
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909156386013184
author Li, Bryan
Haider, Samar
Callison-Burch, Chris
author_facet Li, Bryan
Haider, Samar
Callison-Burch, Chris
contents Do the Spratly Islands belong to China, the Philippines, or Vietnam? A pretrained large language model (LLM) may answer differently if asked in the languages of each claimant country: Chinese, Tagalog, or Vietnamese. This contrasts with a multilingual human, who would likely answer consistently. In this paper, we show that LLMs recall certain geographical knowledge inconsistently when queried in different languages -- a phenomenon we term geopolitical bias. As a targeted case study, we consider territorial disputes, an inherently controversial and multilingual task. We introduce BorderLines, a dataset of territorial disputes which covers 251 territories, each associated with a set of multiple-choice questions in the languages of each claimant country (49 languages in total). We also propose a suite of evaluation metrics to precisely quantify bias and consistency in responses across different languages. We then evaluate various multilingual LLMs on our dataset and metrics to probe their internal knowledge and use the proposed metrics to discover numerous inconsistencies in how these models respond in different languages. Finally, we explore several prompt modification strategies, aiming to either amplify or mitigate geopolitical bias, which highlights how brittle LLMs are and how they tailor their responses depending on cues from the interaction context. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/manestay/borderlines
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_14610
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle This Land is {Your, My} Land: Evaluating Geopolitical Biases in Language Models
Li, Bryan
Haider, Samar
Callison-Burch, Chris
Computation and Language
Do the Spratly Islands belong to China, the Philippines, or Vietnam? A pretrained large language model (LLM) may answer differently if asked in the languages of each claimant country: Chinese, Tagalog, or Vietnamese. This contrasts with a multilingual human, who would likely answer consistently. In this paper, we show that LLMs recall certain geographical knowledge inconsistently when queried in different languages -- a phenomenon we term geopolitical bias. As a targeted case study, we consider territorial disputes, an inherently controversial and multilingual task. We introduce BorderLines, a dataset of territorial disputes which covers 251 territories, each associated with a set of multiple-choice questions in the languages of each claimant country (49 languages in total). We also propose a suite of evaluation metrics to precisely quantify bias and consistency in responses across different languages. We then evaluate various multilingual LLMs on our dataset and metrics to probe their internal knowledge and use the proposed metrics to discover numerous inconsistencies in how these models respond in different languages. Finally, we explore several prompt modification strategies, aiming to either amplify or mitigate geopolitical bias, which highlights how brittle LLMs are and how they tailor their responses depending on cues from the interaction context. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/manestay/borderlines
title This Land is {Your, My} Land: Evaluating Geopolitical Biases in Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14610