# AraWEAT: Multidimensional Analysis of Biases in Arabic Word Embeddings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01575 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01575/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [On Measures of Biases and Harms in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03362/) (2021)
- [Re-contextualizing Fairness in NLP: The Case of India](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12226/) (2022)
- [IndiBias: A Benchmark Dataset to Measure Social Biases in Language Models for Indian Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20147/) (2024)
- [Socially Aware Bias Measurements for Hindi Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07871/) (2021)
- [Building Socio-culturally Inclusive Stereotype Resources with Community Engagement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10514/) (2023)
- [Fair and Argumentative Language Modeling for Computational Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04026/) (2022)
- [Diachronic Analysis of German Parliamentary Proceedings: Ideological Shifts through the Lens of Political Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06295/) (2021)
- [The Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus 2.0: Extensions and Analyses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09216/) (2021)
- [WordBias: An Interactive Visual Tool for Discovering Intersectional Biases Encoded in Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03598/) (2021)
- [DebIE: A Platform for Implicit and Explicit Debiasing of Word Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06598/) (2021)
- [Bridging Fairness and Environmental Sustainability in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04256/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Bias upon Context Length Variation for Bangla](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17375/) (2024)
- [BanStereoSet: A Dataset to Measure Stereotypical Social Biases in LLMs for Bangla](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11638/) (2024)
- [ArabJobs: A Multinational Corpus of Arabic Job Ads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22589/) (2025)
- [Social Bias in Multilingual Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20201/) (2025)
- [Towards Fair and Explainable AI using a Human-Centered AI Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07427/) (2023)
- [Bias Beyond English: Evaluating Social Bias and Debiasing Methods in a Low-Resource Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11183/) (2025)
- [AmchiBias: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Goan Identity Groups with a Minimal Pair Dataset in English and Konkani](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15191/) (2026)
- [FineWeb-CLaR: Culture, Language, and Region Annotations for Benchmark-Aligned Corpus Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25298/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work has shown that distributional word vector spaces often encode human biases like sexism or racism. In this work, we conduct an extensive analysis of biases in Arabic word embeddings by applying a range of recently introduced bias tests on a variety of embedding spaces induced from corpora in Arabic. We measure the presence of biases across several dimensions, namely: embedding models (Skip-Gram, CBOW, and FastText) and vector sizes, types of text (encyclopedic text, and news vs. user-generated content), dialects (Egyptian Arabic vs. Modern Standard Arabic), and time (diachronic analyses over corpora from different time periods). Our analysis yields several interesting findings, e.g., that implicit gender bias in embeddings trained on Arabic news corpora steadily increases over time (between 2007 and 2017). We make the Arabic bias specifications (AraWEAT) publicly available.
