Abstract
Scandinavian countries are perceived as role-models when it comes to gender equality. With the advent of pre-trained language models and their widespread usage, we investigate to what extent gender-based harmful and toxic content exists in selected Scandinavian language models. We examine nine models, covering Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, by manually creating template-based sentences and probing the models for completion. We evaluate the completions using two methods for measuring harmful and toxic completions and provide a thorough analysis of the results. We show that Scandinavian pre-trained language models contain harmful and gender-based stereotypes with similar values across all languages. This finding goes against the general expectations related to gender equality in Scandinavian countries and shows the possible problematic outcomes of using such models in real-world settings. Warning: Some of the examples provided in this paper can be upsetting and offensive.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.nlpcss-1.13
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Editors:
- David Bamman, Dirk Hovy, David Jurgens, Katherine Keith, Brendan O'Connor, Svitlana Volkova
- Venue:
- NLP+CSS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 118–125
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlpcss-1.13
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.nlpcss-1.13
- Cite (ACL):
- Samia Touileb and Debora Nozza. 2022. Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language Models. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS), pages 118–125, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language Models (Touileb & Nozza, NLP+CSS 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.nlpcss-1.13.pdf