Pre-Trained Language Models Represent Some Geographic Populations Better Than Others

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Dunn, Jonathan, Adams, Benjamin, Madabushi, Harish Tayyar
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Dunn, Jonathan
Adams, Benjamin
Madabushi, Harish Tayyar
author_facet Dunn, Jonathan
Adams, Benjamin
Madabushi, Harish Tayyar
contents This paper measures the skew in how well two families of LLMs represent diverse geographic populations. A spatial probing task is used with geo-referenced corpora to measure the degree to which pre-trained language models from the OPT and BLOOM series represent diverse populations around the world. Results show that these models perform much better for some populations than others. In particular, populations across the US and the UK are represented quite well while those in South and Southeast Asia are poorly represented. Analysis shows that both families of models largely share the same skew across populations. At the same time, this skew cannot be fully explained by sociolinguistic factors, economic factors, or geographic factors. The basic conclusion from this analysis is that pre-trained models do not equally represent the world's population: there is a strong skew towards specific geographic populations. This finding challenges the idea that a single model can be used for all populations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_11025
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pre-Trained Language Models Represent Some Geographic Populations Better Than Others
Dunn, Jonathan
Adams, Benjamin
Madabushi, Harish Tayyar
Computation and Language
This paper measures the skew in how well two families of LLMs represent diverse geographic populations. A spatial probing task is used with geo-referenced corpora to measure the degree to which pre-trained language models from the OPT and BLOOM series represent diverse populations around the world. Results show that these models perform much better for some populations than others. In particular, populations across the US and the UK are represented quite well while those in South and Southeast Asia are poorly represented. Analysis shows that both families of models largely share the same skew across populations. At the same time, this skew cannot be fully explained by sociolinguistic factors, economic factors, or geographic factors. The basic conclusion from this analysis is that pre-trained models do not equally represent the world's population: there is a strong skew towards specific geographic populations. This finding challenges the idea that a single model can be used for all populations.
title Pre-Trained Language Models Represent Some Geographic Populations Better Than Others
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11025