United States

Many recent studies have investigated social biases in LLMs but brand bias has received little attention. This research examines the biases exhibited by LLMs towards different brands, a significant concern given the widespread use of LLMs in affected use cases such as product recommendation and market analysis. Biased models may perpetuate societal inequalities, unfairly favoring established global brands while marginalizing local ones. Using a curated dataset across four brand categories, we probe the behavior of LLMs in this space. We find a consistent pattern of bias in this space---both in terms of disproportionately associating global brands with positive attributes and disproportionately recommending luxury gifts for individuals in high-income countries. We also find LLMs are subject to country-of-origin effects which may boost local brand preference in LLM outputs in specific contexts.

EMNLP 2024

“Global is Good, Local is Bad?&#39;&#39;: Understanding Brand Bias in LLMs

rare word in speech translation

retrieval augmented generation

in-context learning

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

Registration Required

ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

“Global is Good, Local is Bad?'': Understanding Brand Bias in LLMs

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been rapidly developed and widely used in various fields, but the (potential) stereotypical bias in the model is largely unexplored. In this study, we present a pioneering measurement framework, $\texttt{ModSCAN}$, to $\underline{\text{SCAN}}$ the stereotypical bias within LVLMs from both vision and language $\underline{\text{Mod}}$alities. $\texttt{ModSCAN}$ examines stereotypical biases with respect to two typical stereotypical attributes (gender and race) across three kinds of scenarios: occupations, descriptors, and persona traits. Our findings suggest that 1) the currently popular LVLMs show significant stereotype biases, with CogVLM emerging as the most biased model; 2) these stereotypical biases may stem from the inherent biases in the training dataset and pre-trained models; 3) the utilization of specific prompt prefixes (from both vision and language modalities) performs well in reducing stereotypical biases. We believe our work can serve as the foundation for understanding and addressing stereotypical bias in LVLMs.

ModSCAN: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Large Vision-Language Models from Vision and Language Modalities

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are popular for training large language models due to their computational efficiency. However, the commonly used top-$k$ routing mechanism suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to the unbalanced routing. Some experts are overflow, where the exceeding tokens are dropped. While some experts are empty, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. To address the dropped tokens and padding, we propose the Rectify-Router, comprising the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification. The Intra-GPU Rectification handles dropped tokens, efficiently routing them to experts within the GPU where they are located to avoid inter-GPU communication. The Fill-in Rectification addresses padding by replacing padding tokens with the tokens that have high routing scores. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification effectively handle dropped tokens and padding, respectively. Furthermore, the combination of them achieves superior performance, surpassing the accuracy of the vanilla top-1 router by 4.7%.

Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-$k$ Router of MoE

We present a large-scale study of linguistic bias exhibited by ChatGPT covering ten dialects of English (Standard American English, Standard British English, and eight widely spoken non-"standard" varieties from around the world). We prompted GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 with text by native speakers of each variety and analyzed the responses via detailed linguistic feature annotation and native speaker evaluation. We find that the models default to "standard" varieties of English; based on evaluation by native speakers, we also find that model responses to non-"standard" varieties consistently exhibit a range of issues: stereotyping (19% worse than for "standard" varieties), demeaning content (25\% worse), lack of comprehension (9% worse), and condescending responses (15% worse). Moreover, if these models are asked to imitate the writing style of prompts in non-"standard" varieties, they produce text that exhibits lower comprehension of the input and is especially prone to stereotyping. GPT-4 improves on GPT-3.5 in terms of comprehension, warmth, and friendliness, but also exhibits a marked increase in stereotyping (+18%). The results indicate that GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 can perpetuate linguistic discrimination toward speakers of non-"standard" varieties.

Linguistic Bias in ChatGPT: Language Models Reinforce Dialect Discrimination

Existing zero-shot cross-lingual NER approaches require substantial prior knowledge of the target language, which is impractical for low-resource languages.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to NER using phonemic representation based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to bridge the gap between representations of different languages.
Our experiments show that our method significantly outperforms baseline models in extremely low-resource languages, with the highest average F1 score (46.38%) and lowest standard deviation (12.67), particularly demonstrating its robustness with non-Latin scripts. Our
codes are available at https://github.com/Gabriel819/zeroshot_ner.git

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual NER Using Phonemic Representations for Low-Resource Languages

The deployment of language models brings challenges in generating reliable text, especially when these models are fine-tuned with human preferences. To extract the encoded knowledge in these models without (potentially) biased human labels, unsupervised probing techniques like Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS) have been developed (Burns et al., 2022). However, salient but unrelated features in activation space can mislead these probes (Farquhar et al., 2023). Addressing this, we propose a cluster-normalization method to minimize the impact of such features by clustering and normalizing activations of contrast pairs before applying unsupervised probing techniques. While this approach does not address the issue of distinguishing between latent knowledge and that portrayed by a simulated agent—a major issue in the literature of eliciting latent knowledge (Paul Christiano and Xu, 2021)—it still significantly improves the accuracy of probes in identifying the intended knowledge amidst distractions.

Cluster-Norm for Unsupervised Probing of Knowledge

Recent efforts have aimed to utilize multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) to extend semantic parsing (SP) across multiple languages without requiring extensive annotations. However, achieving zero-shot cross-lingual transfer for SP remains challenging, leading to a performance gap between source and target languages. In this study, we propose Cross-Lingual Back-Parsing (CBP), a novel data augmentation methodology designed to enhance cross-lingual transfer for SP. Leveraging the representation geometry of the mPLMs, CBP synthesizes target language utterances from source meaning representations. Our methodology effectively performs cross-lingual data augmentation in challenging zero-resource settings, by utilizing only labeled data in the source language and monolingual corpora. Extensive experiments on two cross-language SP benchmarks (Mschema2QA and Xspider) demonstrate that CBP brings substantial gains in the target language. Further analysis of the synthesized utterances shows that our method successfully generates target language utterances with high slot value alignment rates while preserving semantic integrity. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/deokhk/CBP.

Cross-lingual Back-Parsing: Utterance Synthesis from Meaning Representation for Zero-Resource Semantic Parsing

With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a _task-switch_. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.

LLM Task Interference: An Initial Study on the Impact of Task-Switch in Conversational History

Evaluating the bias of LLMs becomes more crucial with their rapid development. However, existing evaluation approaches rely on fixed-form outputs and cannot adapt to the flexible open-text generation scenarios of LLMs (e.g., sentence completion and question answering). To address this, we introduce BiasAlert, a plug-and-play tool designed to detect social bias in open-text generations of LLMs. BiasAlert integrates external human knowledge with its inherent reasoning capabilities to detect bias reliably. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BiasAlert significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods like GPT-4-as-Judge in detecting bias. Furthermore, through application studies, we showcase the utility of BiasAlert in reliable LLM fairness evaluation and bias mitigation across various scenarios. Model and code will be publicly released.

BiasAlert: A Plug-and-play Tool for Social Bias Detection in LLMs

The performance of Transformer models has been enhanced by increasing the number of parameters and the length of the processed text. Consequently, fine-tuning the entire model becomes a memory-intensive process. High-performance methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) typically work with Attention blocks and often overlook MLP blocks, which contain about half of the model parameters. We propose a new selective PEFT method, namely SparseGrad, that performs well on MLP blocks. We transfer layer gradients to a space where only about 1% of the layer's elements remain significant. By converting gradients into a sparse structure, we reduce the number of updated parameters. We apply SparseGrad to fine-tune BERT and RoBERTa for the NLU task and LLaMa-2 for the Question-Answering task. In these experiments, with identical memory requirements, our method outperforms LoRA and MeProp, robust popular state-of-the-art PEFT approaches.

SparseGrad: A Selective Method for Efficient Fine-tuning of MLP Layers

Prompt-based learning paradigm has been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Current clean-label attack, employing a specific prompt as trigger, can achieve success without the need for external triggers and ensuring correct labeling of poisoned samples, which are more stealthy compared to the poisoned-label attack, but on the other hand, facing significant issues with false activations and pose greater challenges, necessitating a higher rate of poisoning. Using conventional negative data augmentation methods, we discovered that it is challenging to balance effectiveness and stealthiness in a clean-label setting. In addressing this issue, we are inspired by the notion that a backdoor acts as a shortcut, and posit that this shortcut stems from the contrast between the trigger and the data utilized for poisoning. In this study, we propose a method named Contrastive Shortcut Injection (CSI), by leveraging activation values, integrates trigger design and data selection strategies to craft stronger shortcut features. With extensive experiments on full-shot and few-shot text classification tasks, we empirically validate CSI’s high effectiveness and high stealthiness at low poisoning rates.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

ModSCAN: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Large Vision-Language Models from Vision and Language Modalities

Similar lecture

Pre-Deployment Advertisement Ranking under Data Scarcity via Context-Aware Criteria Generation with VLMs