@inproceedings{galea-borg-2025-measurement,
    title = "From Measurement to Mitigation: Exploring the Transferability of Debiasing Approaches to Gender Bias in {M}altese Language Models",
    author = "Galea, Melanie  and
      Borg, Claudia",
    editor = "Fale{\'n}ska, Agnieszka  and
      Basta, Christine  and
      Costa-juss{\`a}, Marta  and
      Sta{\'n}czak, Karolina  and
      Nozza, Debora",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.gebnlp-1.26/",
    pages = "290--301",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-277-0",
    abstract = "The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed Natural Language Processing (NLP), enabling performance across diverse tasks with little task-specific training. However, LLMs remain susceptible to social biases, particularly reflecting harmful stereotypes from training data, which can disproportionately affect marginalised communities.We measure gender bias in Maltese LMs, arguing that such bias is harmful as it reinforces societal stereotypes and fails to account for gender diversity, which is especially problematic in gendered, low-resource languages.While bias evaluation and mitigation efforts have progressed for English-centric models, research on low-resourced and morphologically rich languages remains limited. This research investigates the transferability of debiasing methods to Maltese language models, focusing on BERTu and mBERTu, BERT-based monolingual and multilingual models respectively. Bias measurement and mitigation techniques from English are adapted to Maltese, using benchmarks such as CrowS-Pairs and SEAT, alongside debiasing methods Counterfactual Data Augmentation, Dropout Regularization, Auto-Debias, and GuiDebias. We also contribute to future work in the study of gender bias in Maltese by creating evaluation datasets.Our findings highlight the challenges of applying existing bias mitigation methods to linguistically complex languages, underscoring the need for more inclusive approaches in the development of multilingual NLP."
}