Filipino Benchmarks for Measuring Sexist and Homophobic Bias in Multilingual Language Models from Southeast Asia

Lance Calvin Lim Gamboa, Mark Lee


Abstract
Bias studies on multilingual models confirm the presence of gender-related stereotypes in masked models processing languages with high NLP resources. We expand on this line of research by introducing Filipino CrowS-Pairs and Filipino WinoQueer: benchmarks that assess both sexist and anti-queer biases in pretrained language models (PLMs) handling texts in Filipino, a low-resource language from the Philippines. The benchmarks consist of 7,074 new challenge pairs resulting from our cultural adaptation of English bias evaluation datasets—a process that we document in detail to guide similar forthcoming efforts. We apply the Filipino benchmarks on masked and causal multilingual models, including those pretrained on Southeast Asian data, and find that they contain considerable amounts of bias. We also find that for multilingual models, the extent of bias learned for a particular language is influenced by how much pretraining data in that language a model was exposed to. Our benchmarks and insights can serve as a foundation for future work analyzing and mitigating bias in multilingual models.
Anthology ID:
2025.loreslm-1.9
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:
123–134
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.9/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lance Calvin Lim Gamboa and Mark Lee. 2025. Filipino Benchmarks for Measuring Sexist and Homophobic Bias in Multilingual Language Models from Southeast Asia. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages, pages 123–134, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Filipino Benchmarks for Measuring Sexist and Homophobic Bias in Multilingual Language Models from Southeast Asia (Gamboa & Lee, LoResLM 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.loreslm-1.9.pdf
Optionalsupplementarymaterial:
 2025.loreslm-1.9.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip