Divine LLaMAs: Bias, Stereotypes, Stigmatization, and Emotion Representation of Religion in Large Language Models

Flor Plaza-del-Arco, Amanda Curry, Susanna Paoli, Alba Cercas Curry, Dirk Hovy


Abstract
Emotions play important epistemological and cognitive roles in our lives, revealing our values and guiding our actions. Previous work has shown that LLMs display biases in emotion attribution along gender lines. However, unlike gender, which says little about our values, religion, as a socio-cultural system, prescribes a set of beliefs and values for its followers. Religions, therefore, cultivate certain emotions. Moreover, these rules are explicitly laid out and interpreted by religious leaders. Using emotion attribution, we explore how different religions are represented in LLMs. We find that:Major religions in the US and European countries are represented with more nuance, displaying a more shaded model of their beliefs.Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are strongly stereotyped.Judaism and Islam are stigmatized – the models’ refusal skyrocket. We ascribe these to cultural bias in LLMs and the scarcity of NLP literature on religion. In the rare instances where religion is discussed, it is often in the context of toxic language, perpetuating the perception of these religions as inherently toxic. This finding underscores the urgent need to address and rectify these biases. Our research emphasizes the crucial role emotions play in shaping our lives and how our values influence them.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.251
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
4346–4366
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.251
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Flor Plaza-del-Arco, Amanda Curry, Susanna Paoli, Alba Cercas Curry, and Dirk Hovy. 2024. Divine LLaMAs: Bias, Stereotypes, Stigmatization, and Emotion Representation of Religion in Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 4346–4366, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Divine LLaMAs: Bias, Stereotypes, Stigmatization, and Emotion Representation of Religion in Large Language Models (Plaza-del-Arco et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.251.pdf