# Social Bias in Large Language Models For Bangla: An Empirical Study on Gender and Religious Bias

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03536 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03536/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Certifying and removing disparate impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3756/) (2014)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Are Not Robust Multiple Choice Selectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03882/) (2023)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05783/) (2021)
- [Toxicity in ChatGPT: Analyzing Persona-assigned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05335/) (2023)
- [XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13822/) (2021)
- [Self-collaboration Code Generation via ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07590/) (2023)
- [Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13722/) (2022)
- [BanglaBERT: Language Model Pretraining and Benchmarks for Low-Resource Language Understanding Evaluation in Bangla](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00204/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14168/) (2021)
- [SeeGULL: A Stereotype Benchmark with Broad Geo-Cultural Coverage Leveraging Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11840/) (2023)
- [Self-Debiasing Large Language Models: Zero-Shot Recognition and Reduction of Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01981/) (2024)
- [Disclosure and Mitigation of Gender Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11190/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Distilled Language Models via Counterfactual Role Reversal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12574/) (2022)
- [CrossSum: Beyond English-Centric Cross-Lingual Summarization for 1,500+ Language Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08804/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Large Language Models across Multiple Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00277/) (2024)
- [Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06437/) (2021)
- [A Trip Towards Fairness: Bias and De-Biasing in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13862/) (2023)
- [IndiBias: A Benchmark Dataset to Measure Social Biases in Language Models for Indian Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20147/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [How Deep Is Representational Bias in LLMs? The Cases of Caste and Religion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03712/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Gendered Stereotypes in Emotional Attributes for Bangla in Multilingual Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06432/) (2024)
- [Cross-Lingual Sentiment Misalignment: Auditing Multilingual Language Models for Inversion Risk, Dialectal Representation, and Affective Stability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17469/) (2026)
- [Mind the Language Gap: Automated and Augmented Evaluation of Bias in LLMs for High- and Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18560/) (2025)
- [BanStereoSet: A Dataset to Measure Stereotypical Social Biases in LLMs for Bangla](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11638/) (2024)
- [Purdah and Patriarchy: Evaluating and Mitigating South Asian Biases in Open-Ended Multilingual LLM Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18466/) (2025)
- [Is Lying Only Sinful in Islam? Exploring Religious Bias in Multilingual Large Language Models Across Major Religions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03943/) (2025)
- [Redirected, Not Removed: Task-Dependent Stereotyping Reveals the Limits of LLM Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02669/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Extrinsic Gender Bias for Bangla Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10636/) (2024)
- [How do datasets, developers, and models affect biases in a low-resourced language?: The Case of the Bengali Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06816/) (2025)
- [Are LLMs Ready to Replace Bangla Annotators?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16241/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking Bengali Dialectal Bias: A Multi-Stage Framework Integrating RAG-Based Translation and Human-Augmented RLAIF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21359/) (2026)
- [Some Dialects Are More Equal Than Others: Non-Prestigious Arabic Dialectal Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23955/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has put forward the study of biases as a crucial field. It is important to assess the influence of different types of biases embedded in LLMs to ensure fair use in sensitive fields. Although there have been extensive works on bias assessment in English, such efforts are rare and scarce for a major language like Bangla. In this work, we examine two types of social biases in LLM generated outputs for Bangla language. Our main contributions in this work are: (1) bias studies on two different social biases for Bangla, (2) a curated dataset for bias measurement benchmarking and (3) testing two different probing techniques for bias detection in the context of Bangla. This is the first work of such kind involving bias assessment of LLMs for Bangla to the best of our knowledge. All our code and resources are publicly available for the progress of bias related research in Bangla NLP.