“The dentist is an involved parent, the bartender is not”: Revealing Implicit Biases in QA with Implicit BBQ

Aarushi Wagh, Saniya Srivastava


Abstract
Existing benchmarks evaluating biases in large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on explicit cues, declaring protected attributes like religion, race, gender by name. However, real-world interactions often contain implicit biases, inferred subtly through names, cultural cues, or traits. This critical oversight creates a significant blind spot in fairness evaluation. We introduce ImplicitBBQ, a benchmark extending the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ) with implicitly cued protected attributes across 6 categories. Our evaluation of GPT-4o on ImplicitBBQ illustrates troubling performance disparity from explicit BBQ prompts, with accuracy declining up to 7% in the “sexual orientation” subcategory and consistent decline located across most other categories. This indicates that current LLMs contain implicit biases undetected by explicit benchmarks. ImplicitBBQ offers a crucial tool for nuanced fairness evaluation in NLP.
Anthology ID:
2025.eval4nlp-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Mousumi Akter, Tahiya Chowdhury, Steffen Eger, Christoph Leiter, Juri Opitz, Erion Çano
Venues:
Eval4NLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
85–90
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.eval4nlp-1.7/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aarushi Wagh and Saniya Srivastava. 2025. “The dentist is an involved parent, the bartender is not”: Revealing Implicit Biases in QA with Implicit BBQ. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems, pages 85–90, Mumbai, India. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“The dentist is an involved parent, the bartender is not”: Revealing Implicit Biases in QA with Implicit BBQ (Wagh & Srivastava, Eval4NLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.eval4nlp-1.7.pdf