Cited by 364Ethics and Social Impacts of AIHate Speech and Cyberbullying DetectionTopic Modeling

Biases in Large Language Models: Origins, Inventory, and Discussion

Open access
Navigli, Roberto, Conia, Simone, Ross, Björn·2023·Journal of Data and Information Quality

Abstract

In this article, we introduce and discuss the pervasive issue of bias in the large language models that are currently at the core of mainstream approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP). We first introduce data selection bias, that is, the bias caused by the choice of texts that make up a training corpus. Then, we survey the different types of social bias evidenced in the text generated by language models trained on such corpora, ranging from gender to age, from sexual orientation to ethnicity, and from religion to culture. We conclude with directions focused on measuring, reducing, and tackling the aforementioned types of bias.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3597307

Cites

118 of 118 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Demographic biases in large language models can impact critical decisions and have potentially severe consequences.

    “These biases, which could be influenced by factors like model architecture, training data, and deployment context, can impact critical decisions and have potentially severe consequences [4].”

    From Evaluating and addressing demographic disparities in medical large language models: a systematic review (2025) · cites this paper as [4]

    The Introduction (page unavailable) says biases can make systems unsuitable for real-world applications and lead to sometimes catastrophic consequences; its court-system example illustrates a consequential decision. Section 2 links bias to training data and prompting, but the passages do not establish the citing sentence’s additional suggestion that model architecture influences these biases. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Large language models are trained on human-generated text that often contains biases.

    “These models, however, are trained on human-generated text, which often contains biases [3–5].”
  • LLMs can mimic biases and other deficiencies from their training data or even outright plagiarize.

    “LLMs can mimic biases and other deficiencies from their training data (38–41) or even outright plagiarize (42).”
  • Population bias has clearly been identified as a very significant issue more generally.

    “While population bias has clearly been identified as a very significant issue more generally [95]”
  • Randomizing the assignment of character names from a diverse pool minimizes sensitivity to tokenization problems and mitigates ethnic bias.

    “We randomize the assignment of character names from a diverse pool to minimize sensitivity to tokenization problems and mitigate ethnic bias (Navigli et al., 2023; Jiang et al., 2024).”

    From NoLiMa: Long-Context Evaluation Beyond Literal Matching (2025) · cites this paper as Navigli et al., 2023

    Section 3.7 (Ethnicity and Race; page unavailable) discusses ethnic bias in language models and the need to avoid it, but does not address assigning character names. Searches for tokenization, diverse name pools, and randomized name assignment found no passage saying that this method reduces tokenization sensitivity or mitigates ethnic bias. (LLM, conf=0.75)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 14

  1. [9]9. Marion Bartl, Malvina Nissim, and Albert Gatt. 2020. Unmasking contextual stereotypes: Measuring and mitigating BERT's gender bias. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1-16. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/2020.gebnlp-1.1.
  2. [21]21. Gavin Burnage and Dominic Dunlop. 1992. Encoding the British National Corpus. In Proceedings of the 13th Interna- tional Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora.
  3. [29]29. Kai-Wei Chang, Vinod Prabhakaran, and Vicente Ordonez. 2019. Bias and fairness in natural language processing. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, Hong Kong, China, November 3-7, 2019 -Tutorial Abstracts, Timothy Baldwin and Marine Carpuat (Eds.). Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/D19-2004/.
  4. [38]38. Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Hardmeier, Will Radford, and Kellie Webster (Eds.). 2019. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/W19-3800.
  5. [39]39. Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Hardmeier, Will Radford, and Kellie Webster (Eds.). 2020. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/2020.gebnlp-1.0.
  6. [44]44. Sunipa Dev, Tao Li, Jeff M. Phillips, and Vivek Srikumar. 2020. On measuring and mitigating biased inferences of word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2020, the 32nd Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2020, the 10th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2020, New York, NY, February 7-12, 2020. AAAI Press, 7659-7666. Retrieved from https: //ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/6267.
  7. [74]74. Philipp Koehn. 2005. EuroParl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. In Proceedings of Machine Trans- lation Summit X: Papers. 79-86. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/2005.mtsummit-papers.11.
  8. [84]84. Catherine Macleod, Nancy Ide, and Ralph Grishman. 2000. The American national corpus: A standardized re- source for American English. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Eval- uation (LREC'00). European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Retrieved from http://www.lrec-conf.org/ proceedings/lrec2000/pdf/196.pdf.
  9. [99]99. Michele Benedetto Neitz. 2013. Socioeconomic bias in the judiciary. Clevel. State Law Rev. 61 (2013), 137-165. Re- trieved from https://ssrn.com/abstract=2149311.
  10. [105]105. Giovanni Paolini, Ben Athiwaratkun, Jason Krone, Jie Ma, Alessandro Achille, Rishita Anubhai, Cícero Nogueira dos Santos, Bing Xiang, and Stefano Soatto. 2021. Structured prediction as translation between augmented natural languages. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2021, Virtual Event, Austria, May 3-7, 2021. OpenReview.net. Retrieved from https://openreview.net/forum?id=US-TP-xnXI.
  11. [106]106. Yada Pruksachatkun, Anil Ramakrishna, Kai-Wei Chang, Satyapriya Krishna, Jwala Dhamala, Tanaya Guha, and Xiang Ren (Eds.). 2021. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/2021.trustnlp-1.0.
  12. [107]107. Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. 2019. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI Blog 1, 8 (2019). Retrieved from https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/ better-language-models/language-models.pdf.
  13. [110]110. Sebastian Ruder. 2022. Scaling NLP systems to the next 1000 languages. Retrieved from https://www.2022.aclweb. org/invited-talks.
  14. [116]116. Simone Tedeschi, Johan Bos, Thierry Declerck, Jan Hajič, Daniel Hershcovich, Eduard H. Hovy, Alexander Koller, Simon Krek, Steven Schockaert, Rico Sennrich, Ekaterina Shutova, and Roberto Navigli. 2023. What's the meaning of superhuman performance in today's NLU? In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Compu- tational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics (to appear).

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Navigli, R., Conia, S., & Ross, B.
Affiliations
  • Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
  • Sapienza University of Rome (IT)
  • University of Edinburgh (GB)
Venue
Journal of Data and Information Quality
Published
2023-06-22
Volume
15
Issue
2
Pages
1-21
ISSN
  • 1936-1955 (ISSN-L)
  • 1936-1963
OpenAlex
W4376643691
Cited by
364
References
118
Citations by year
2026: 107 · 2025: 164 · 2024: 81 · 2023: 12
FWCI
90.88
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Journal of Data and Information Quality (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • IRIS Research product catalog (Sapienza University of Rome) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
European Commission (HORIZON2020, 726487)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
Keywords
large language models, algorithmic bias, data selection bias, social bias, gender bias, age bias, sexual orientation bias, ethnic prejudice, religious bias, cultural bias, bias measurement, bias mitigation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review