Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language Models

Abstract

Scandinavian countries are perceived as rolemodels when it comes to gender equality. With the advent of pre-trained language models and their widespread usage, we investigate to what extent gender-based harmful and toxic content exist in selected Scandinavian language models. We examine nine models, covering Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, by manually creating template-based sentences and probing the models for completion. We evaluate the completions using two methods for measuring harmful and toxic completions and provide a thorough analysis of the results. We show that Scandinavian pre-trained language models contain harmful and gender-based stereotypes with similar values across all languages. This finding goes against the general expectations related to gender equality in Scandinavian countries and shows the possible problematic outcomes of using such models in real-world settings.Warning: this paper contains unobfuscated examples some readers may find upsetting and offensive.

Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing 2023 (SlavicNLP 2023)

“…Recently, Nangia et al (2020) curate template sentences to evaluate biases, including racial and gender ones, while Névéol et al (2022) transform this dataset into French while incorporating culture-specific issues into the templates. Subsequently, the specific task of exploring gender bias in lower resource languages was investigated for Scandinavian languages (Touileb and Nozza, 2022).…”

“…1. Translated templates -originally developed to evaluate gender bias in Scandinavian languages (Touileb and Nozza, 2022) The manual templates encompass attributes, preferences, and perceived roles in society, work and studies inspired by the categorisation in Baluchova (2010) and Kolek and Valdrová (2020). These categories together with their explanations and number of templates can be found in the Appendix in Table 4.…”

“…In other words, using these models produces a completion harmful to gender groups for up to 13.2% of completions. These results can then be compared directly with HON-EST scores for Danish, Swedish and Norwegian (Touileb and Nozza, 2022), where the worst overall score reported was 0.0495, showing that the monolingual West Slavic language models perform up to twice worse than Scandinavian models when it comes to hurtful completions. Future work should look into the reasons for these differences.…”

“…Limited research exists in further lan-guages. French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian (Nozza et al, 2021) have received some attention, as have Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian language models (Touileb and Nozza, 2022). Research into Slavic languages has been limited to covering gender bias in Slovenian and Croatian word embeddings (Supej et al, 2019;Ulčar et al, 2021).…”