mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language Models

arXiv 2211.11678 ↗First posted 21 Nov 2022cs.CLcited by 7

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Abstract (arXiv)

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 exist 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.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2022.

Builds on

19 of 42 references.

References · 19

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  2. 2020Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLPcited by 956
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7 more
  1. 2020What the [MASK]? Making Sense of Language-Specific BERT Modelscited by 44
  2. 2020Investigating Gender Bias in BERTcited by 40
  3. 2021Operationalizing a National Digital Library: The Case for a Norwegian Transformer Modelcited by 23
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  5. 2019Good Secretaries, Bad Truck Drivers? Occupational Gender Stereotypes in Sentiment Analysiscited by 19
  6. 2020Addressing Exposure Bias With Document Minimum Risk Training: Cambridge at the WMT20 Biomedical Translation Taskcited by 8
  7. 2022The State of Profanity Obfuscation in Natural Language Processingcited by 4

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2023: 6; 2024: 0; 2025: 1.

7 papers.

  1. 2023Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Modelscited by 32
  2. 2023NorBench -- A Benchmark for Norwegian Language Modelscited by 23
  3. 2023Measuring Gender Bias in West Slavic Language Modelscited by 10
  4. 2023Beyond Traditional Teaching: The Potential of Large Language Models and Chatbots in Graduate Engineering Educationcited by 4
  5. 2023Measuring Normative and Descriptive Biases in Language Models Using Census Datacited by 3
  6. 2025Social Bias in Multilingual Language Models: A Surveycited by 2
  7. 2023Learning Horn Envelopes via Queries from Large Language Modelscited by 0