Social Bias in Large Language Models For Bangla: An Empirical Study on Gender and Religious Bias

Jayanta Sadhu, Maneesha Rani Saha, Rifat Shahriyar


Abstract
The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has put forward the study of biases as a crucial field. It is important to assess the influence of different types of biases embedded in LLMs to ensure fair use in sensitive fields. Although there have been extensive works on bias assessment in English, such efforts are rare and scarce for a major language like Bangla. In this work, we examine two types of social biases in LLM generated outputs for Bangla language. Our main contributions in this work are: (1) bias studies on two different social biases for Bangla, (2) a curated dataset for bias measurement benchmarking and (3) testing two different probing techniques for bias detection in the context of Bangla. This is the first work of such kind involving bias assessment of LLMs for Bangla to the best of our knowledge. All our code and resources are publicly available for the progress of bias related research in Bangla NLP.
Anthology ID:
2025.loreslm-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venues:
LoResLM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
204–218
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jayanta Sadhu, Maneesha Rani Saha, and Rifat Shahriyar. 2025. Social Bias in Large Language Models For Bangla: An Empirical Study on Gender and Religious Bias. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages, pages 204–218, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Social Bias in Large Language Models For Bangla: An Empirical Study on Gender and Religious Bias (Sadhu et al., LoResLM 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.16.pdf
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 2025.loreslm-1.16.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip