Style Transfer as Bias Mitigation: Diffusion Models for Synthetic Mental Health Text for Arabic

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Auteurs principaux: Mankarious, Saad, Zirikly, Aya
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Mankarious, Saad
Zirikly, Aya
author_facet Mankarious, Saad
Zirikly, Aya
contents Synthetic data offers a promising solution for mitigating data scarcity and demographic bias in mental health analysis, yet existing approaches largely rely on pretrained large language models (LLMs), which may suffer from limited output diversity and propagate biases inherited from their training data. In this work, we propose a pretraining-free diffusion-based approach for synthetic text generation that frames bias mitigation as a style transfer problem. Using the CARMA Arabic mental health corpus, which exhibits a substantial gender imbalance, we focus on male-to-female style transfer to augment underrepresented female-authored content. We construct five datasets capturing varying linguistic and semantic aspects of gender expression in Arabic and train separate diffusion models for each setting. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate consistently high semantic fidelity between source and generated text, alongside meaningful surface-level stylistic divergence, while qualitative analysis confirms linguistically plausible gender transformations. Our results show that diffusion-based style transfer can generate high-entropy, semantically faithful synthetic data without reliance on pretrained LLMs, providing an effective and flexible framework for mitigating gender bias in sensitive, low-resource mental health domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_14124
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Style Transfer as Bias Mitigation: Diffusion Models for Synthetic Mental Health Text for Arabic
Mankarious, Saad
Zirikly, Aya
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Synthetic data offers a promising solution for mitigating data scarcity and demographic bias in mental health analysis, yet existing approaches largely rely on pretrained large language models (LLMs), which may suffer from limited output diversity and propagate biases inherited from their training data. In this work, we propose a pretraining-free diffusion-based approach for synthetic text generation that frames bias mitigation as a style transfer problem. Using the CARMA Arabic mental health corpus, which exhibits a substantial gender imbalance, we focus on male-to-female style transfer to augment underrepresented female-authored content. We construct five datasets capturing varying linguistic and semantic aspects of gender expression in Arabic and train separate diffusion models for each setting. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate consistently high semantic fidelity between source and generated text, alongside meaningful surface-level stylistic divergence, while qualitative analysis confirms linguistically plausible gender transformations. Our results show that diffusion-based style transfer can generate high-entropy, semantically faithful synthetic data without reliance on pretrained LLMs, providing an effective and flexible framework for mitigating gender bias in sensitive, low-resource mental health domains.
title Style Transfer as Bias Mitigation: Diffusion Models for Synthetic Mental Health Text for Arabic
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14124