@inproceedings{nadeem-etal-2026-framing,
    title = "Framing Political Bias in Multilingual {LLM}s Across {P}akistani Languages",
    author = "Nadeem, Afrozah  and
      Dras, Mark  and
      Naseem, Usman",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1689/",
    pages = "36444--36486",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly shape public discourse, yet most evaluations of economic and political bias have focused on high-resource Western languages and contexts. This leaves a blind spots in low-resource, multilingual regions such as Pakistan, where linguistic identity is closely tied to regional, religious, and political ideologies. We present a systematic evaluation of political bias in 13 state-of-the-art LLMs across five Pakistani languages: Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Balochi. Our framework integrates a culturally adapted Political Compass Test (PCT) with multi-level framing analysis, capturing both ideological stance (economic/social axes) and stylistic framing (content, tone, emphasis). The prompts are aligned with 11 socio-political themes specific to the Pakistani context. The results show that while LLMs significantly reflect liberal-left orientations consistent with Western training data, they exhibit more authoritarian framing in regional languages, highlighting language-conditioned ideological modulation. We also identify model-specific bias patterns in all languages. These findings show the need for culturally grounded multilingual bias examining frameworks in NLP. Code and dataset are available."
}