# Cross-Lingual Probing and Community-Grounded Analysis of Gender Bias in Low-Resource Bengali

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17764 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17764/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
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- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [Dealing with Disagreements: Looking Beyond the Majority Vote in Subjective Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05719/) (2021)
- [Large Scale Crowdsourcing and Characterization of Twitter Abusive Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00393/) (2018)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12688/) (2019)
- [Thinking Fast and Slow in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05206/) (2022)
- [Towards Leaving No Indic Language Behind: Building Monolingual Corpora, Benchmark and Models for Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05409/) (2022)
- [Sustainable Modular Debiasing of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03646/) (2021)
- [Challenges in Automated Debiasing for Toxic Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00086/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14168/) (2021)
- [On Measures of Biases and Harms in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03362/) (2021)
- [Machine Translationese: Effects of Algorithmic Bias on Linguistic Complexity in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00287/) (2021)
- [Do LLMs Understand Social Knowledge? Evaluating the Sociability of Large Language Models with SocKET Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14938/) (2023)
- [Collecting a Large-Scale Gender Bias Dataset for Coreference Resolution and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03858/) (2021)
- [Theories of "Gender" in NLP Bias Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02526/) (2022)
- [Neural Media Bias Detection Using Distant Supervision With BABE -- Bias Annotations By Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14557/) (2022)
- [Towards a Common Understanding of Contributing Factors for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Language Models: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16768/) (2023)
- [The Effect of Translationese in Machine Translation Test Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08069/) (2019)
- [Debiasing isn't enough! -- On the Effectiveness of Debiasing MLMs and their Social Biases in Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02938/) (2022)
- [Tackling Online Abuse: A Survey of Automated Abuse Detection Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06024/) (2019)
- [Choose Your Lenses: Flaws in Gender Bias Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11471/) (2022)
- [Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05664/) (2021)
- [NBIAS: A Natural Language Processing Framework for Bias Identification in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01681/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in recent years; yet, issues of intrinsic gender bias persist, especially in non-English languages. Although current research mostly emphasizes English, the linguistic and cultural biases inherent in Global South languages, like Bengali, are little examined. This research seeks to examine the characteristics and magnitude of gender bias in Bengali, evaluating the efficacy of current approaches in identifying and alleviating bias. We use several methods to extract gender-biased utterances, including lexicon-based mining, computational classification models, translation-based comparison analysis, and GPT-based bias creation. Our research indicates that the straight application of English-centric bias detection frameworks to Bengali is severely constrained by language disparities and socio-cultural factors that impact implicit biases. To tackle these difficulties, we executed two field investigations inside rural and low-income areas, gathering authentic insights on gender bias. The findings demonstrate that gender bias in Bengali presents distinct characteristics relative to English, requiring a more localized and context-sensitive methodology. Additionally, our research emphasizes the need of integrating community-driven research approaches to identify culturally relevant biases often neglected by automated systems. Our research enhances the ongoing discussion around gender bias in AI by illustrating the need to create linguistic tools specifically designed for underrepresented languages. This study establishes a foundation for further investigations into bias reduction in Bengali and other Indic languages, promoting the development of more inclusive and fair NLP systems.