Dutch CrowS-Pairs: Adapting a Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Language Models for Dutch

Warning: This paper contains explicit statements of offensive stereotypes which might be upsetting. Language models are prone to exhibiting biases, further amplifying unfair and harmful stereotypes. Given the fast-growing popularity and wide application of these models, it is necessary to ensure safe and fair language models. As of recent considerable attention has been paid to measuring bias in language models, yet the majority of studies have focused only on English language. A Dutch version of the US-specific CrowS-Pairs dataset for measuring bias in Dutch language models is introduced. The resulting dataset consists of 1463 sentence pairs that cover bias in 9 categories, such as Sexual orientation, Gender and Disability. The sentence pairs are composed of contrasting sentences, where one of the sentences concerns disadvantaged groups and the other advantaged groups. Using the Dutch CrowS-Pairs dataset, we show that various language models, BERTje, RobBERT, multilingual BERT, GEITje and Mistral-7B exhibit substantial bias across the various bias categories. Using the English and French versions of the CrowS-Pairs dataset, bias was evaluated in English (BERT and RoBERTa) and French (FlauBERT and CamemBERT) language models, and it was shown that English models exhibit the most bias, whereas Dutch models the least amount of bias. Additionally, results also indicate that assigning a persona to a language model changes the level of bias it exhibits. These findings highlight the variability of bias across languages and contexts, suggesting that cultural and linguistic factors play a significant role in shaping model biases.