mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Geographical Erasure in Language Generation

arXiv 2310.14777 ↗First posted 23 Oct 2023cs.CL cs.LGcited by 15

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of world knowledge. However, since these models are trained on large swaths of internet data, they are at risk of inordinately capturing information about dominant groups. This imbalance can propagate into generated language. In this work, we study and operationalise a form of geographical erasure, wherein language models underpredict certain countries. We demonstrate consistent instances of erasure across a range of LLMs. We discover that erasure strongly correlates with low frequencies of country mentions in the training corpus. Lastly, we mitigate erasure by finetuning using a custom objective.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

Builds on

30 of 49 references.

References · 30

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  3. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  4. 2016Pointer Sentinel Mixture Modelscited by 3,096
  5. 2021TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoodscited by 2,975
  6. 2019The Curious Case of Neural Text Degenerationcited by 2,916
  7. 2020The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modelingcited by 2,411
  8. 2016Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learningcited by 2,007
  9. 2022BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 1,984
  10. 2019Language Models as Knowledge Bases?cited by 1,936
  11. 2016Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddingscited by 1,312
  12. 2021BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-modelscited by 1,245
18 more
  1. 2021Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gophercited by 1,202
  2. 2018Hierarchical Neural Story Generationcited by 1,193
  3. 2019How Can We Know What Language Models Know?cited by 959
  4. 2020Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLPcited by 956
  5. 2020StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language modelscited by 924
  6. 2022GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Modelcited by 713
  7. 2020CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Modelscited by 710
  8. 2018Gender Bias in Coreference Resolutioncited by 442
  9. 2021BOLD: Dataset and Metrics for Measuring Biases in Open-Ended Language Generationcited by 412
  10. 2019On Measuring Social Biases in Sentence Encoderscited by 398
  11. 2017OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translationcited by 251
  12. 2021Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challengescited by 202
  13. 2020Detecting Emergent Intersectional Biases: Contextualized Word Embeddings Contain a Distribution of Human-like Biasescited by 167
  14. 2019Reducing Sentiment Bias in Language Models via Counterfactual Evaluationcited by 148
  15. 2019Assessing Social and Intersectional Biases in Contextualized Word Representationscited by 135
  16. 2023Inspecting the Geographical Representativeness of Images from Text-to-Image Modelscited by 44
  17. 2022The Long Arc of Fairness: Formalisations and Ethical Discoursecited by 13
  18. 2022Richer Countries and Richer Representationscited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 5; 2025: 4; 2026: 6.

15 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuancescited by 60
  2. 2025Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLPcited by 40
  3. 2024Large Language Models as Recommender Systems: A Study of Popularity Biascited by 26
  4. 2024Extrinsic Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Large Language Modelscited by 24
  5. 2024ValueCompass: A Framework for Measuring Contextual Value Alignment Between Human and LLMscited by 20
  6. 2025Do You Know About My Nation? Investigating Multilingual Language Models' Cultural Literacy Through Factual Knowledgecited by 8
  7. 2025The World According to LLMs: How Geographic Origin Influences LLMs' Entity Deduction Capabilitiescited by 5
  8. 2026Do LLM hallucination detectors suffer from low-resource effect?cited by 4
  9. 2024Evaluating Large Language Models with fmevalcited by 3
  10. 2026Omissive Bias in Religious Representation: Benchmarking LLM Answers to Everyday Ethical Decision-makingcited by 2
  11. 2025Toward Socially Aware Vision-Language Models: Evaluating Cultural Competence Through Multimodal Story Generationcited by 1
  12. 2026Where Do Images Come From? Analyzing Captions to Geographically Profile Datasetscited by 1
3 more
  1. 2026Epistemic Injustice in Language Models: An Audit of Pretraining Filters and Guardrailscited by 0
  2. 2026On Defining Erasure Harms for NLPcited by 0
  3. 2026On Epistemic Diversity in Large Language Modelscited by 0