Linguistic Bias in Language Models

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Overview

The field examines how dialect, register, language, locale, and demographic cues affect what language models generate, understand, recommend, or judge. Researchers use controlled minimal pairs, multilingual benchmarks, human comparisons, and analyses of model representations to test differences across settings such as AAVE and standard English, low-resource languages, and high-stakes assessment. Mitigation approaches include balanced training and fine-tuning, decoding-time fairness checks, activation steering, and retrieval methods that preserve evidence across languages. A central tension is that alignment can reduce overt bias while latent associations and disparities persist or shift with prompt wording, task, language, and model architecture, making reliable measurement and generalization difficult.

Latest papers

CardsList

90 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, up 14% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Style over Substance? Linguistic Bias in LLM-based Peer Review Copy title

    Oct 26, 2026Sai Suresh Macharla Vasu, Sumedh Santosh Joshi, Philipp Christmann +6Linguistic Bias in Language ModelsBias in LLM-as-a-Judge

    CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) · University of Technology Nuremberg +1

  2. Investigating the Impact of Learner Errors on Social Bias in Large Language Models

    Oct 21, 2026Federico Marcuzzi, Martin Christoph, Iryna Gurevych +1Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria · Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab), Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt and National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, Germany · Department of Computer Science at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), United States

  3. GRAFT: Restoring the Missing Sampling Interface in Continuous Diffusion Language Models

    Oct 21, 2026Haoning Yang, Lili PanDiffusion Language Model DecodingContinuous Diffusion Language Models

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

  4. Where Are Language-Specific Features Represented in Multilingual LLMs? Everywhere

    Oct 18, 2026Mikaela Martins, Jonathan DunnMultilingual Language ModelsConcept Localization in Language Models

    Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5. Social Bias in Chinese Large Language Models under Social Media Expressions

    Oct 10, 2026Mo ZhouSocial Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    School of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210000, China

  6. Does Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Dominate Arabic Dialects in LLMs? A Representation-Level Analysis

    Oct 8, 2026Abdu Sallouh, Nicholas Popovič, Michael FärberArabic Language ModelsArabic NLP

    Technical University of Dresden · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · ScaDS.AI, TU Dresden

  7. A Systematic Investigation of Bias in Large Language Models for Advertising Relevance

    Oct 6, 2026Weiwei Wang, Yinchuan Xu, Jialu Gao +2Bias in LLM-as-a-JudgeLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Microsoft

  8. Synthetic Pre-pretraining Survives Scale, but Not as a Grammatical Prior

    Sep 30, 2026Atsuki Yamaguchi, Tatsuro Inaba, Joel Niklaus +3Language Model PretrainingSynthetic Data Pretraining

    University of Sheffield, UK · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE · Hugging Face +3

  9. When Words Speak Louder than Images: Towards Understanding Language Bias in Vision-Language Models

    Sep 28, 2026Yizhou Fang, Siyue Chen, Zimo Qi +3VLM EvaluationVision-Language Models

    University of Waterloo · Independent Researcher · Johns Hopkins University +3

  10. Some Dialects Are More Equal Than Others: Non-Prestigious Arabic Dialectal Bias in LLMs

    Sep 21, 2026Mai Mohamed Eida, Ryan Dolan, Paul de Nijs +1Dialect Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

  11. Summarization Bias: The Directional Collapse of Objective Projection into Told-Mode Labels in Large Language Models --- A Conceptual Framework and Registered Test Protocol

    Sep 17, 2026Levent BulutLanguage Model Bias EvaluationLinguistic Bias in Language Models

    Independent Researcher

  12. Linguistic Triggers of Gender and Racial Bias in Open-Weight LLMs Applied to Recruitment

    Sep 16, 2026Kosuke Kitahara, Nobuhiro YamaguchiGender Bias in Language ModelsAI-Assisted Decision Making

    Recruit Co., Ltd. 1-9-2 Marunouchi Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-6640 Japan

  13. From a River in Gilead to the Inference Distributions of Large Language Models: Covert Dialect Bias and Linguistic Profiling at Scale

    Sep 16, 2026Chowdhury Mohammad Abdullah, Rita OrjiSocial Bias in Language ModelsDialect Bias in Language Models

    Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University Halifax, NS, Canada

  14. Message capacity and claim wording set the transition points of collective truth-finding in language-model networks

    Sep 15, 2026Makoto FukushimaBelief Updating in LLMsLinguistic Bias in Language Models

    Research Division, Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd., Wako, Saitama, Japan

  15. How Humans and LLMs Read Gender into "Gender-Neutral" Physical Descriptions

    Sep 14, 2026Yingjia Wan, Lin Lin, Elisa KreissGender Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Department of Communication University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) · Department of Computer Science University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

  16. FreqBLiMP: Frequency-Controlled Minimal Pairs Reveal Robustness and Fragility of LLMs Under Lexical Rarity

    Sep 7, 2026Tyrone White, Yuki AraseLLM EvaluationSyntactic Generalization in Language Models

    School of Computing, Institute of Science Tokyo Tokyo, Japan

  17. The Dialect Tax: Dialectal Biases Persist throughout the Language Modeling Pipeline

    Aug 24, 2026ElleDialect Bias in Language ModelsLinguistic Bias in Language Models

    University of Oxford, Department of Computer Science

  18. Does Episodic Memory Help Close the Lexical Frequency Gap in Sensitivity to Syntactic Contrasts? A Test Using Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

    Aug 24, 2026Jing Liu, Najoung KimMemory-Augmented Language ModelsSyntactic Generalization in Language Models

    CoML Team, LSCP ENS, Université PSL, EHESS, CNRS · Department of Linguistics Boston University

  19. WildHandBench: A Benchmark for Handwritten Text Understanding that Challenges MLLMs and Humans

    Aug 24, 2026Jun Zhang, Qiao Zhao, Cheng Cui +6Document UnderstandingDocument Parsing Benchmarks

    Baidu Inc.

  20. SDoH-Aware Narrative Anchoring Bias in Medical LLMs for Trustworthy Clinical Decision Support

    Aug 24, 2026Ahnaf Atef Choudhury, Ramkrishna SahaMedical LLMsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Department of Information Sciences and Technology George Mason University, USA · Department of Computer Science The University of Texas at Dallas, USA

  21. Epistemic Subordination: Generative AI and the Infrastructure of Knowledge

    Aug 19, 2026Gilad Abiri, Emanuel V. TowfighAI GovernanceCultural Bias in Language Models

  22. Semantic Bandits: In-Context Exploration-Exploitation is Biased by Semantic Priors

    Aug 17, 2026David Eric Austin, Kaheer Suleman, Jackie Chi Kit CheungExploration-Exploitation TradeoffLinguistic Bias in Language Models

    McGill University · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · Skyfall AI +1

  23. Left-Branching Transformers Excel at Right-Branching Languages: Data Shapes Word Order Preferences in Language Models

    Aug 15, 2026Varvara Arzt, Allan Hanbury, Terra BlevinsMultilingual Language ModelsDecoder-Only Language Models

    Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien · Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University

  24. It's How You Ask: Gender-Associated Linguistic Bias in LLMs

    Aug 13, 2026Katherine Van Koevering, Anjalie FieldGender Bias in Language ModelsSocial Bias in Language Models

    Data Science and AI Institute Johns Hopkins University · Computer Science Department Johns Hopkins University

  25. Language Models Generalize to Human-like Word Order Preferences

    Aug 5, 2026Amanda Popadich, Shane Steinert-ThrelkeldSyntactic Generalization in Language ModelsLanguage Modeling

    Department of Linguistics, University of Washington

  26. The Fairness Collapse Phenomenon: Bias Amplification in Language Models Trained on Synthetic Data

    Aug 4, 2026Irina Proskurina, Antoine Gourru, Julien VelcinSynthetic Data PretrainingSelf-Training for Language Models

    Laboratoire Hubert Curien, UMR CNRS 5516, Saint-Étienne, France · Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Université Lumière Lyon 2, ERIC · École Centrale de Lyon, LIRIS, CNRS UMR 5205

  27. Cross-Lingual Bias in Large Language Models: A Comparative Analysis of English and Swahili

    Aug 4, 2026Ruolei Zhang, Teddy Njuguna, Yue FengMultilingual Language Model EvaluationLanguage Model Safety Evaluation

    University of Birmingham

  28. A Heuristic Perspective on Debiasing Language Models

    Aug 1, 2026Tian Lan, Yemin Wang, Chuancheng Shi +6Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Debiasing

    Inner Mongolia University · Xiamen University · University of Sydney +3

  29. AI systems and the reproduction of (standard) language ideologies in World Englishes

    Jul 30, 2026Kingsley UgwuanyiCultural Bias in Language ModelsLinguistic Bias in Language Models

    University of Nigeria, Nsukka · King’s College London · SOAS, University of London

  30. Probing Latent Colombian Identity Inferences in Qwen2.5-7B with Natural Language Autoencoders

    Jul 23, 2026Pablo Santiago Potes Velasco, María del Mar García Matabanchoy, Óscar Julián Pérez Ladino +3LLM InterpretabilityCultural Bias in Language Models

    Universidad Autónoma de Occidente Cali, Colombia · Universidad Autónoma de Occidente GobLab-UAI Cali, Colombia