HEARTS: A Holistic Framework for Explainable, Sustainable and Robust Text Stereotype Detection

Theo King, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama, Emre Kazim, Philip Colin Treleaven


Abstract
A stereotype is a generalised claim about a social group. Such claims change with culture and context and are often phrased in everyday language, which makes them hard to detect: the State of the Art Large Language Models (LLMs) reach only 68% macro-F1 on the yes/no task “does this sentence contain a stereotype?”. We present HEARTS, a Holistic framework for Explainable, sustAinable and Robust Text Stereotype detection that brings together NLP and social-science. The framework is built on the Expanded Multi-Grain Stereotype Dataset (EMGSD), 57201 English sentences that cover gender, profession, nationality, race, religion and LGBTQ+ topics, adding 10% more data for under-represented groups while keeping high annotator agreement (𝜅 = 0.82). Fine-tuning the lightweight ALBERT-v2 model on EMGSD raises binary detection scores to 81.5% macro-F1, matching full BERT while producing 200× less CO2. For Explainability, we blend SHAP and LIME token level scores and introduce a confidence measure that increases when the model is correct (𝜌 = 0.18). We then use HEARTS to assess 16 SOTA LLMs on 1050 neutral prompts each for stereotype propagation: stereotype rates fall by 23% between model generations, yet clear differences remain across model families (LLaMA > Gemini > GPT > Claude). HEARTS thus supplies a practical, low-carbon and interpretable toolkit for measuring stereotype bias in language.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–18
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.1/
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Cite (ACL):
Theo King, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama, Emre Kazim, and Philip Colin Treleaven. 2025. HEARTS: A Holistic Framework for Explainable, Sustainable and Robust Text Stereotype Detection. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1–18, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HEARTS: A Holistic Framework for Explainable, Sustainable and Robust Text Stereotype Detection (King et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.1.pdf