Papers › Mitigating Language-Dependent Ethnic Bias in BERT

Mitigating Language-Dependent Ethnic Bias in BERT

13 Sep 2021EMNLP 2021 11arXiv:2109.05704archive 2025-07-28

Jaimeen Ahn, Alice Oh

BERT and other large-scale language models (LMs) contain gender and racial bias. They also exhibit other dimensions of social bias, most of which have not been studied in depth, and some of which vary depending on the language. In this paper, we study ethnic bias and how it varies across languages by analyzing and mitigating ethnic bias in monolingual BERT for English, German, Spanish, Korean, Turkish, and Chinese. To observe and quantify ethnic bias, we develop a novel metric called Categorical Bias score. Then we propose two methods for mitigation; first using a multilingual model, and second using contextual word alignment of two monolingual models. We compare our proposed methods with monolingual BERT and show that these methods effectively alleviate the ethnic bias. Which of the two methods works better depends on the amount of NLP resources available for that language. We additionally experiment with Arabic and Greek to verify that our proposed methods work for a wider variety of languages.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

3 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 3 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from jaimeenahn/ethnic_bias. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections