SESGO: Spanish Evaluation of Stereotypical Generative Outputs

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Main Authors: Robles, Melissa, Bernal, Catalina, Raigoso, Denniss, Rubio, Mateo Dulce
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Robles, Melissa
Bernal, Catalina
Raigoso, Denniss
Rubio, Mateo Dulce
author_facet Robles, Melissa
Bernal, Catalina
Raigoso, Denniss
Rubio, Mateo Dulce
contents This paper addresses the critical gap in evaluating bias in multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), with a specific focus on Spanish language within culturally-aware Latin American contexts. Despite widespread global deployment, current evaluations remain predominantly US-English-centric, leaving potential harms in other linguistic and cultural contexts largely underexamined. We introduce a novel, culturally-grounded framework for detecting social biases in instruction-tuned LLMs. Our approach adapts the underspecified question methodology from the BBQ dataset by incorporating culturally-specific expressions and sayings that encode regional stereotypes across four social categories: gender, race, socioeconomic class, and national origin. Using more than 4,000 prompts, we propose a new metric that combines accuracy with the direction of error to effectively balance model performance and bias alignment in both ambiguous and disambiguated contexts. To our knowledge, our work presents the first systematic evaluation examining how leading commercial LLMs respond to culturally specific bias in the Spanish language, revealing varying patterns of bias manifestation across state-of-the-art models. We also contribute evidence that bias mitigation techniques optimized for English do not effectively transfer to Spanish tasks, and that bias patterns remain largely consistent across different sampling temperatures. Our modular framework offers a natural extension to new stereotypes, bias categories, or languages and cultural contexts, representing a significant step toward more equitable and culturally-aware evaluation of AI systems in the diverse linguistic environments where they operate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_03329
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SESGO: Spanish Evaluation of Stereotypical Generative Outputs
Robles, Melissa
Bernal, Catalina
Raigoso, Denniss
Rubio, Mateo Dulce
Computers and Society
Computation and Language
This paper addresses the critical gap in evaluating bias in multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), with a specific focus on Spanish language within culturally-aware Latin American contexts. Despite widespread global deployment, current evaluations remain predominantly US-English-centric, leaving potential harms in other linguistic and cultural contexts largely underexamined. We introduce a novel, culturally-grounded framework for detecting social biases in instruction-tuned LLMs. Our approach adapts the underspecified question methodology from the BBQ dataset by incorporating culturally-specific expressions and sayings that encode regional stereotypes across four social categories: gender, race, socioeconomic class, and national origin. Using more than 4,000 prompts, we propose a new metric that combines accuracy with the direction of error to effectively balance model performance and bias alignment in both ambiguous and disambiguated contexts. To our knowledge, our work presents the first systematic evaluation examining how leading commercial LLMs respond to culturally specific bias in the Spanish language, revealing varying patterns of bias manifestation across state-of-the-art models. We also contribute evidence that bias mitigation techniques optimized for English do not effectively transfer to Spanish tasks, and that bias patterns remain largely consistent across different sampling temperatures. Our modular framework offers a natural extension to new stereotypes, bias categories, or languages and cultural contexts, representing a significant step toward more equitable and culturally-aware evaluation of AI systems in the diverse linguistic environments where they operate.
title SESGO: Spanish Evaluation of Stereotypical Generative Outputs
topic Computers and Society
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03329