A Comprehensive Framework to Operationalize Social Stereotypes for Responsible AI Evaluations

Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Sunipa Dev, Héctor Pérez-Urbina, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran


Abstract
Societal stereotypes are at the center of a myriad of responsible AI interventions targeted at reducing the generation and propagation of potentially harmful outcomes. While these efforts are much needed, they tend to be fragmented and often address different parts of the issue without adopting a unified or holistic approach to social stereotypes and how they impact various parts of the machine learning pipeline. As a result, current interventions fail to capitalize on the underlying mechanisms that are common across different types of stereotypes, and to anchor on particular aspects that are relevant in certain cases. In this paper, we draw on social psychological research and build on NLP data and methods, to propose a unified framework to operationalize stereotypes in generative AI evaluations. Our framework identifies key components of stereotypes that are crucial in AI evaluation, including the target group, associated attribute, relationship characteristics, perceiving group, and context. We also provide considerations and recommendations for its responsible use.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1526
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30018–30031
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1526/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Sunipa Dev, Héctor Pérez-Urbina, and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran. 2025. A Comprehensive Framework to Operationalize Social Stereotypes for Responsible AI Evaluations. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 30018–30031, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Comprehensive Framework to Operationalize Social Stereotypes for Responsible AI Evaluations (Mostafazadeh Davani et al., EMNLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1526.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.emnlp-main.1526.checklist.pdf