Purdah and Patriarchy: Evaluating and Mitigating South Asian Biases in Open-Ended Multilingual LLM Generations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rinki, Mamnuya, Raj, Chahat, Mukherjee, Anjishnu, Zhu, Ziwei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rinki, Mamnuya
Raj, Chahat
Mukherjee, Anjishnu
Zhu, Ziwei
author_facet Rinki, Mamnuya
Raj, Chahat
Mukherjee, Anjishnu
Zhu, Ziwei
contents Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) often overlook intersectional and culturally specific biases, particularly in underrepresented multilingual regions like South Asia. This work addresses these gaps by conducting a multilingual and intersectional analysis of LLM outputs across 10 Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, identifying how cultural stigmas influenced by purdah and patriarchy are reinforced in generative tasks. We construct a culturally grounded bias lexicon capturing previously unexplored intersectional dimensions including gender, religion, marital status, and number of children. We use our lexicon to quantify intersectional bias and the effectiveness of self-debiasing in open-ended generations (e.g., storytelling, hobbies, and to-do lists), where bias manifests subtly and remains largely unexamined in multilingual contexts. Finally, we evaluate two self-debiasing strategies (simple and complex prompts) to measure their effectiveness in reducing culturally specific bias in Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Our approach offers a nuanced lens into cultural bias by introducing a novel bias lexicon and evaluation framework that extends beyond Eurocentric or small-scale multilingual settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18466
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Purdah and Patriarchy: Evaluating and Mitigating South Asian Biases in Open-Ended Multilingual LLM Generations
Rinki, Mamnuya
Raj, Chahat
Mukherjee, Anjishnu
Zhu, Ziwei
Computation and Language
Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) often overlook intersectional and culturally specific biases, particularly in underrepresented multilingual regions like South Asia. This work addresses these gaps by conducting a multilingual and intersectional analysis of LLM outputs across 10 Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, identifying how cultural stigmas influenced by purdah and patriarchy are reinforced in generative tasks. We construct a culturally grounded bias lexicon capturing previously unexplored intersectional dimensions including gender, religion, marital status, and number of children. We use our lexicon to quantify intersectional bias and the effectiveness of self-debiasing in open-ended generations (e.g., storytelling, hobbies, and to-do lists), where bias manifests subtly and remains largely unexamined in multilingual contexts. Finally, we evaluate two self-debiasing strategies (simple and complex prompts) to measure their effectiveness in reducing culturally specific bias in Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Our approach offers a nuanced lens into cultural bias by introducing a novel bias lexicon and evaluation framework that extends beyond Eurocentric or small-scale multilingual settings.
title Purdah and Patriarchy: Evaluating and Mitigating South Asian Biases in Open-Ended Multilingual LLM Generations
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18466