The power of Prompts: Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Bias in MT with LLMs
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Abstract (arXiv)
This paper studies gender bias in machine translation through the lens of Large Language Models (LLMs). Four widely-used test sets are employed to benchmark various base LLMs, comparing their translation quality and gender bias against state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for English to Catalan (En rightarrow Ca) and English to Spanish (En rightarrow Es) translation directions. Our findings reveal pervasive gender bias across all models, with base LLMs exhibiting a higher degree of bias compared to NMT models. To combat this bias, we explore prompting engineering techniques applied to an instruction-tuned LLM. We identify a prompt structure that significantly reduces gender bias by up to 12% on the WinoMT evaluation dataset compared to more straightforward prompts. These results significantly reduce the gender bias accuracy gap between LLMs and traditional NMT systems.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 39 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2024.
Builds on
39 of 68 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 6; 2026: 4.
12 papers.
- 2024Watching the Watchers: Exposing Gender Disparities in Machine Translation Quality Estimationcited by 10
- 2025An LLM-as-a-judge Approach for Scalable Gender-Neutral Translation Evaluationcited by 2
- 2025Ready to Translate, Not to Represent? Bias and Performance Gaps in Multilingual LLMs Across Language Families and Domainscited by 1
- 2024MT-LENS: An all-in-one Toolkit for Better Machine Translation Evaluationcited by 0
- 2025Auto-Search and Refinement: An Automated Framework for Gender Bias Mitigation in Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2025Discrimination by LLMs: Cross-lingual Bias Assessment and Mitigation in Decision-Making and Summarisationcited by 0
- 2025Conveying Imagistic Thinking in Traditional Chinese Medicine Translation: A Prompt Engineering and LLM-Based Evaluation Frameworkcited by 0
- 2025Conveying Imagistic Thinking in Traditional Chinese Medicine Translation: A Prompt Engineering and LLM-Based Evaluation Frameworkcited by 0
- 2026MORPHOGEN: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Gender-Aware Morphological Generationcited by 0
- 2026Cultural Fidelity in English-to-Hindi Translation: A Preservation-Fluency Frontier for Gender Recoverabilitycited by 0
- 2026Contaminated Collaboration: Measuring Gender Bias Transfer in LLM-Assisted Student Writingcited by 0
- 2026Mitigating Gender Bias in English to Romanian Machine Translationcited by 0
- 2026Mitigating Gender Bias in English to Romanian Machine Translation9 Aug 2026
- 2026Contaminated Collaboration: Measuring Gender Bias Transfer in LLM-Assisted Student Writing14 Jun 2026
- 2026Cultural Fidelity in English-to-Hindi Translation: A Preservation-Fluency Frontier for Gender Recoverability26 May 2026
- 2026MORPHOGEN: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Gender-Aware Morphological Generation20 Apr 2026
- 2025Conveying Imagistic Thinking in Traditional Chinese Medicine Translation: A Prompt Engineering and LLM-Based Evaluation Framework1 Dec 2025
- 2025Conveying Imagistic Thinking in Traditional Chinese Medicine Translation: A Prompt Engineering and LLM-Based Evaluation Framework28 Nov 2025
- 2025Ready to Translate, Not to Represent? Bias and Performance Gaps in Multilingual LLMs Across Language Families and Domains9 Oct 2025
- 2025Discrimination by LLMs: Cross-lingual Bias Assessment and Mitigation in Decision-Making and Summarisation10 Sep 2025
- 2025An LLM-as-a-judge Approach for Scalable Gender-Neutral Translation Evaluation16 Apr 2025
- 2025Auto-Search and Refinement: An Automated Framework for Gender Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models17 Feb 2025
- 2024MT-LENS: An all-in-one Toolkit for Better Machine Translation Evaluation16 Dec 2024
- 2024Watching the Watchers: Exposing Gender Disparities in Machine Translation Quality Estimation14 Oct 2024