SeeGULL: A Stereotype Benchmark with Broad Geo-Cultural Coverage Leveraging Generative Models
Abstract
Along with the recent advances in large language modeling, there is growing concern that language technologies may reflect, propagate, and amplify various social stereotypes about groups of people. Publicly available stereotype benchmarks play a crucial role in detecting and mitigating this issue in language technologies to prevent both representational and allocational harms in downstream applications. However, existing stereotype benchmarks are limited in their size and coverage, largely restricted to stereotypes prevalent in the Western society. This is especially problematic as language technologies are gaining hold across the globe. To address this gap, we present SeeGULL, a broad-coverage stereotype dataset, expanding the coverage by utilizing the generative capabilities of large language models such as PaLM and GPT-3, and leveraging a globally diverse rater pool to validate prevalence of those stereotypes in society. SeeGULL is an order of magnitude larger in terms of size, and contains stereotypes for 179 identity groups spanning 6 continents, 8 different regions, 178 countries, 50 US states, and 31 Indian states and union territories. We also get fine-grained offensiveness scores for different stereotypes and demonstrate how stereotype perceptions for the same identity group differs across in-region vs out-region annotators.