The power of Prompts: Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Bias in MT with LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sant, Aleix, Escolano, Carlos, Mash, Audrey, Fornaciari, Francesca De Luca, Melero, Maite
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Sant, Aleix
Escolano, Carlos
Mash, Audrey
Fornaciari, Francesca De Luca
Melero, Maite
author_facet Sant, Aleix
Escolano, Carlos
Mash, Audrey
Fornaciari, Francesca De Luca
Melero, Maite
contents This paper studies gender bias in machine translation through the lens of Large Language Models (LLMs). Four widely-used test sets are employed to benchmark various base LLMs, comparing their translation quality and gender bias against state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for English to Catalan (En $\rightarrow$ Ca) and English to Spanish (En $\rightarrow$ Es) translation directions. Our findings reveal pervasive gender bias across all models, with base LLMs exhibiting a higher degree of bias compared to NMT models. To combat this bias, we explore prompting engineering techniques applied to an instruction-tuned LLM. We identify a prompt structure that significantly reduces gender bias by up to 12% on the WinoMT evaluation dataset compared to more straightforward prompts. These results significantly reduce the gender bias accuracy gap between LLMs and traditional NMT systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_18786
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The power of Prompts: Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Bias in MT with LLMs
Sant, Aleix
Escolano, Carlos
Mash, Audrey
Fornaciari, Francesca De Luca
Melero, Maite
Computation and Language
This paper studies gender bias in machine translation through the lens of Large Language Models (LLMs). Four widely-used test sets are employed to benchmark various base LLMs, comparing their translation quality and gender bias against state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for English to Catalan (En $\rightarrow$ Ca) and English to Spanish (En $\rightarrow$ Es) translation directions. Our findings reveal pervasive gender bias across all models, with base LLMs exhibiting a higher degree of bias compared to NMT models. To combat this bias, we explore prompting engineering techniques applied to an instruction-tuned LLM. We identify a prompt structure that significantly reduces gender bias by up to 12% on the WinoMT evaluation dataset compared to more straightforward prompts. These results significantly reduce the gender bias accuracy gap between LLMs and traditional NMT systems.
title The power of Prompts: Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Bias in MT with LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.18786