"You'll be a nurse, my son!" Automatically assessing gender biases in autoregressive language models in French and Italian.

Language models are now massively used for a variety of tasks, including open-ended generation and writing assistance. However, generated texts can encapsulate biases and harm users. A variety of articles aim at detecting, measuring and mitigating stereotypical biases, but focus mainly on English an...

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Publicado en:Language Resources & Evaluation Vol. 59; no. 2; pp. 1495 - 1524
Autores principales: Ducel, Fanny, Névéol, Aurélie, Fort, Karën
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Jun2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jun2025
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        10.1007/s10579-024-09780-6
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        atl: "You'll be a nurse, my son!" Automatically assessing gender biases in autoregressive language models in French and Italian.
      aug:
        au:
          Ducel, Fanny
          Névéol, Aurélie
          Fort, Karën
        affil:
          https://ror.org/03xjwb503 LISN, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France
          https://ror.org/02en5vm52 Sorbonne-Université, LORIA, Paris/Nancy, France
      su:
        Language models
        Italian language
        Language & languages
        Sex discrimination
        Autoregressive models
      sug:
        subj:
          Language models
          Italian language
          Language & languages
          Sex discrimination
          Autoregressive models
      keyword:
        Communication and Culture Linguistics
        French
        Gender
        Italian
        Language
        Language model
        Stereotypical biases
      ab: Language models are now massively used for a variety of tasks, including open-ended generation and writing assistance. However, generated texts can encapsulate biases and harm users. A variety of articles aim at detecting, measuring and mitigating stereotypical biases, but focus mainly on English and on pre-training tasks. Thus, we propose a framework to automatically measure gender biases generated by language models in inflected languages, in a practical setting. Herein, we report experiments using this framework on seven autoregressive language models used to generate more than 52,000 cover letters in French, addressing 203 industry and sectors, and over 4100 cover letters in Italian, on 55 sectors. Associations between occupation and gender are studied using a system that we introduce to automatically identify morpho-syntactic gender markers in text. Results suggest that all models are strongly biased towards the generation of texts containing masculine gender markers. Overall, generated texts contain twice as many masculine (vs. feminine) markers in French, and eight times as many in Italian. Models also exacerbate gender stereotypes that are evidenced in social science studies and associate feminine inflections with occupations related to care, children and physical appearance, whereas occupations that require physical, technical and manual skills are strongly associated with masculine markers.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
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    language: English
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      custom: Language Resources & Evaluation is a copyright of Springer, 2025. All Rights Reserved.
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      holder: Springer Nature
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