Exploring Social Bias in Slovenia: The EEC-SL Dataset

Jaya Caporusso, Damar Hoogland, Boshko Koloski, Matthew Purver, Senja Pollak, Spela Vintar


Abstract
We introduce the EEC-SL dataset, an adaptation of the Equity Evaluation Corpus from English to Slovenian. Based on 11 sentence templates, the dataset contains 8,640 sentences, including pairs of minimally-distant sentences, varying with regard to one of two variables: gender (female or male), and ethnicity (Slovenian or not-Slovenian). In order to validate our selection of personal names, we create a localised version of the Implicit Association Test for ethnic bias, in which participants show a significant implicit bias favouring Slovenian over non-Slovenian names. We use the dataset to evaluate social bias in three computational language models (large language models and an encoder-only transformer) to perform sentiment analysis—specifically, valence. We analyse the results in terms of differences in sentiment between minimally-distant groups of sentences and inferential tests. We found limited evidence for social bias with regard to ethnicity, and no evidence for gender bias, in any of the employed models.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.318
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:
4019–4030
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-318
DOI:
10.63317/2pdt2x4ci6e5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaya Caporusso, Damar Hoogland, Boshko Koloski, Matthew Purver, Senja Pollak, and Spela Vintar. 2026. Exploring Social Bias in Slovenia: The EEC-SL Dataset. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4019–4030, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Social Bias in Slovenia: The EEC-SL Dataset (Caporusso et al., LREC 2026)
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