On the Influence of Gender and Race in Romantic Relationship Prediction from Large Language Models

Abhilasha Sancheti, Haozhe An, Rachel Rudinger


Abstract
We study the presence of heteronormative biases and prejudice against interracial romantic relationships in large language models by performing controlled name-replacement experiments for the task of relationship prediction. We show that models are less likely to predict romantic relationships for (a) same-gender character pairs than different-gender pairs; and (b) intra/inter-racial character pairs involving Asian names as compared to Black, Hispanic, or White names. We examine the contextualized embeddings of first names and find that gender for Asian names is less discernible than non-Asian names. We discuss the social implications of our findings, underlining the need to prioritize the development of inclusive and equitable technology.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
479–494
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.29
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhilasha Sancheti, Haozhe An, and Rachel Rudinger. 2024. On the Influence of Gender and Race in Romantic Relationship Prediction from Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 479–494, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Influence of Gender and Race in Romantic Relationship Prediction from Large Language Models (Sancheti et al., EMNLP 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.29.pdf