EsBBQ and CaBBQ: The Spanish and Catalan Bias Benchmarks for Question Answering

Valle Ruiz-Fernández, Mario Mina, Júlia Falcão, Luis Antonio Vasquez Reina, Anna Salles, Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre, Olatz Perez-de-Viñaspre


Abstract
Previous literature has largely shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) perpetuate social biases learnt from their pre-training data. Given the notable lack of resources for social bias evaluation in languages other than English, and for social contexts outside of the United States, this paper introduces the Spanish and the Catalan Bias Benchmarks for Question Answering (EsBBQ and CaBBQ). Based on the original BBQ, these two parallel datasets are designed to assess social bias across 10 categories using a multiple-choice QA setting, now adapted to the Spanish and Catalan languages and to the social context of Spain. We report evaluation results on different LLMs, factoring in model family, size and variant. Our results show that models tend to fail to choose the correct answer in ambiguous scenarios, and that high QA accuracy often correlates with greater reliance on social biases.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.309
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
3884–3907
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-309
DOI:
10.63317/2u47873noowf
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Valle Ruiz-Fernández, Mario Mina, Júlia Falcão, Luis Antonio Vasquez Reina, Anna Salles, Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre, and Olatz Perez-de-Viñaspre. 2026. EsBBQ and CaBBQ: The Spanish and Catalan Bias Benchmarks for Question Answering. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3884–3907, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
EsBBQ and CaBBQ: The Spanish and Catalan Bias Benchmarks for Question Answering (Ruiz-Fernández et al., LREC 2026)
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