Instruction-Following Language Models (IFLMs) are promising and versatile tools for solving many downstream, information-seeking tasks. Given their success, there is an urgent need to have a shared resource to determine whether existing and new IFLMs are prone to produce biased language interactions. In this paper, we propose Prompt Association Test (P-AT): a new resource for testing the presence of social biases in IFLMs. P-AT stems from WEAT (Caliskan et al., 2017) and generalizes the notion of measuring social biases to IFLMs. Basically, we cast WEAT word tests in promptized classification tasks, and we associate a metric - the bias score. Our resource consists of 2310 prompts. We then experimented with several families of IFLMs discovering gender and race biases in all the analyzed models. We expect P-AT to be an important tool for quantifying bias across different dimensions and, therefore, for encouraging the creation of fairer IFLMs before their distortions have consequences in the real world.

The impressive achievements of transformers force NLP researchers to delve into how these models represent the underlying structure of natural language. In this paper, we propose a novel standpoint to investigate the above issue: using typological similarities among languages to observe how their respective monolingual models encode structural information. We aim to layer-wise compare transformers for typologically similar languages to observe whether these similarities emerge for particular layers. For this investigation, we propose to use Centered Kernel Alignment to measure similarity among weight matrices. We found that syntactic typological similarity is consistent with the similarity between the weights in the middle layers, which are the pretrained BERT layers to which syntax encoding is generally attributed. Moreover, we observe that a domain adaptation on semantically equivalent texts enhances this similarity among weight matrices.