Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Siddique, Zara, Turner, Liam D., Espinosa-Anke, Luis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06917
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917797226872832
author Siddique, Zara
Turner, Liam D.
Espinosa-Anke, Luis
author_facet Siddique, Zara
Turner, Liam D.
Espinosa-Anke, Luis
contents Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to propagate and amplify harmful stereotypes, particularly those that disproportionately affect marginalised communities. To understand the effect of these stereotypes more comprehensively, we introduce GlobalBias, a dataset of 876k sentences incorporating 40 distinct gender-by-ethnicity groups alongside descriptors typically used in bias literature, which enables us to study a broad set of stereotypes from around the world. We use GlobalBias to directly probe a suite of LMs via perplexity, which we use as a proxy to determine how certain stereotypes are represented in the model's internal representations. Following this, we generate character profiles based on given names and evaluate the prevalence of stereotypes in model outputs. We find that the demographic groups associated with various stereotypes remain consistent across model likelihoods and model outputs. Furthermore, larger models consistently display higher levels of stereotypical outputs, even when explicitly instructed not to.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_06917
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who is better at math, Jenny or Jingzhen? Uncovering Stereotypes in Large Language Models
Siddique, Zara
Turner, Liam D.
Espinosa-Anke, Luis
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to propagate and amplify harmful stereotypes, particularly those that disproportionately affect marginalised communities. To understand the effect of these stereotypes more comprehensively, we introduce GlobalBias, a dataset of 876k sentences incorporating 40 distinct gender-by-ethnicity groups alongside descriptors typically used in bias literature, which enables us to study a broad set of stereotypes from around the world. We use GlobalBias to directly probe a suite of LMs via perplexity, which we use as a proxy to determine how certain stereotypes are represented in the model's internal representations. Following this, we generate character profiles based on given names and evaluate the prevalence of stereotypes in model outputs. We find that the demographic groups associated with various stereotypes remain consistent across model likelihoods and model outputs. Furthermore, larger models consistently display higher levels of stereotypical outputs, even when explicitly instructed not to.
title Who is better at math, Jenny or Jingzhen? Uncovering Stereotypes in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06917