The influence of Large Language Models (LLMs) is rapidly growing, automating more jobs over time. Assessing the fairness of LLMs is crucial due to their expanding impact. Studies reveal the reflection of societal norms and biases in LLMs, which creates a risk of propagating societal stereotypes in downstream tasks. Many studies on bias in LLMs focus on gender bias in various NLP applications. However, there’s a gap in research on bias in emotional attributes, despite the close societal link between emotion and gender. This gap is even larger for low-resource languages like Bangla. Historically, women are associated with emotions like empathy, fear, and guilt, while men are linked to anger, bravado, and authority. This pattern reflects societal norms in Bangla-speaking regions. We offer the first thorough investigation of gendered emotion attribution in Bangla for both closed and open source LLMs in this work. Our aim is to elucidate the intricate societal relationship between gender and emotion specifically within the context of Bangla. We have been successful in showing the existence of gender bias in the context of emotions in Bangla through analytical methods and also show how emotion attribution changes on the basis of gendered role selection in LLMs. All of our resources including code and data are made publicly available to support future research on Bangla NLP. Warning: This paper contains explicit stereotypical statements that many may find offensive.

Pretrained language models inherently exhibit various social biases, prompting a crucial examination of their social impact across various linguistic contexts due to their widespread usage. Previous studies have provided numerous methods for intrinsic bias measurements, predominantly focused on high-resource languages. In this work, we aim to extend these investigations to Bangla, a low-resource language. Specifically, in this study, we (1) create a dataset for intrinsic gender bias measurement in Bangla, (2) discuss necessary adaptations to apply existing bias measurement methods for Bangla, and (3) examine the impact of context length variation on bias measurement, a factor that has been overlooked in previous studies. Through our experiments, we demonstrate a clear dependency of bias metrics on context length, highlighting the need for nuanced considerations in Bangla bias analysis. We consider our work as a stepping stone for bias measurement in the Bangla Language and make all of our resources publicly available to support future research.