Are Pretrained Multilingual Models Equally Fair across Languages? (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pretrained multilingual language models can help bridge the digital language divide, enabling high-quality NLP models for lower-resourced languages.
Approach: They propose to use a multilingual dataset to examine whether multilingual models are equally fair across languages.
Outcome: The proposed model enables apples-to-apples comparison across languages of group disparities in multilingual language models.

Similar Papers

Assessing Multilingual Fairness in Pre-trained Multimodal Representations (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent pre-trained multimodal models have shown exceptional capabilities towards connecting images and natural language.
Approach: They propose two new fairness notions for pre-trained multimodal models that consider language as the fairness recipient.
Outcome: The proposed models can be generalized to multilingualism by cross-lingual alignment . the results show that the models are individually fair across languages .
Comparing Biases and the Impact of Multilingual Training across Multiple Languages (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Currently, studies on bias and fairness in natural language processing focus on a single language and/or across few attributes (e.g. gender, race). However, biases can manifest differently across languages for individual attributes.
Approach: They adapt existing sentiment bias templates in English to Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish for race, religion, nationality, and gender.
Outcome: The proposed model favors groups that are dominant in each language's culture, indicating bias amplification, after multilingual finetuning.
Social Bias in Multilingual Language Models: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pretrained multilingual models exhibit the same social bias as models processing English texts.
Approach: They examine the literature on bias evaluation and mitigation approaches in multilingual and non-English contexts and identify gaps in the field.
Outcome: The proposed models perform well on multilingual language understanding benchmarks and are consistent with the current literature.
FairLex: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Fairness in Legal Text Processing (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using pre-trained language models, we evaluate performance group disparities while none of these techniques guarantee fairness, nor consistently mitigate group disparity.
Approach: They present a benchmark suite of four datasets for evaluating the fairness of pre-trained language models and the techniques used to fine-tune them for downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed methods show that performance group disparities are vibrant in many cases, while none of these techniques guarantee fairness, nor consistently mitigate group disparity.
Your fairness may vary: Pretrained language model fairness in toxic text classification (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pre-trained, bidirectional language models have revolutionized natural language processing research . authors show that focusing on accuracy measures alone can lead to models with wide variation in fairness characteristics .
Approach: They propose to use two post-processing methods to improve model fairness without retraining . they use pretrained language models of varying sizes on two toxic text classification tasks .
Outcome: The proposed methods improve model fairness without retraining . the results show that the fairness variation is more than just accuracy .
Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challenges (2023.findings-eacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Language models are inequitable at encoding and re-presentation, but there is much to be studied and criticism for the existing research that remains to be addressed.
Approach: They propose to survey fairness in multilingual and non-English contexts . they argue that it is infeasible to achieve comprehensive coverage in terms of fairness datasets based on English .
Outcome: The proposed methods are infeasible to scale across languages and cultures, the authors argue . they argue that the current methods are too narrowly focused on specific dimensions and types of biases and cannot scale across cultures.
When Is Multilinguality a Curse? Language Modeling for 250 High- and Low-Resource Languages (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multilingual language models are widely used to extend NLP systems to low-resource languages.
Approach: They pre-train over 10,000 monolingual and multilingual language models for over 250 languages including multiple language families that are under-studied in NLP.
Outcome: The results show that adding multilingual data improves low-resource language modeling performance, similar to increasing low-source dataset sizes by up to 33%.
Quantifying Language Disparities in Multilingual Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Contemporary NLP development relies on digital language datasets to build large language models.
Approach: They propose a framework that disentangles confounding variables and introduces interpretable metrics to quantify model performance and language disparities.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a more reliable measurement of model performance and language disparities for low-resource languages.
Factual Consistency of Multilingual Pretrained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent work shows that monolingual English language models fill-in-the-blank differently for paraphrases describing the same fact.
Approach: They propose a resource to analyze consistency of English language models . they find that mBERT is as inconsistent as English BERT in paraphrases .
Outcome: The proposed model is as inconsistent as English BERT in English paraphrases, but it is more so for all the other 45 languages.
Breaking Boundaries: Investigating the Effects of Model Editing on Cross-linguistic Performance (2025.naacl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pretrained language models (PLMs) have revolutionized NLP but amplify linguistic inequities in multilingual applications.
Approach: They evaluate pretrained language models including Mistral, TowerInstruct, OpenHathi, Tamil-Llama, and Kan-Lama across eight languages spanning high-resource and low-resourced settings.
Outcome: The proposed models fail to bridge linguistic divides and are inefficient when compared to other models.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations