Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) can learn both useful knowledge and harmful stereotypes, making bias evaluation essential.Existing frameworks fall into two types: those considering reasoning steps (Thinking Process-Aware Evaluation, TPAE) and those focusing only on final outputs (Straight-to-the-Answer Evaluation, SAE).Prior TPAE studies showed effectiveness in assessing gender bias but relied on template-based, word-counting prompts, limiting generalization to other bias types, languages, and reasoning-based methods.In this study, we introduce MBTP, a multilingual social bias benchmark that incorporates human-generated pro- and anti-stereotype reasoning as part of the thinking process, and propose a few-shot meta-evaluation method that enables scalable bias assessment without model fine-tuning.From experiments evaluating 13 social bias categories across 8 languages, we find that human-generated thinking consistently yields higher-quality evaluations than LLM-generated or template-based approaches.Furthermore, TPAE demonstrates superior performance over SAE, highlighting the importance of considering reasoning processes in bias evaluation.We will release the MBTP dataset upon paper acceptance.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.2204
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 47726–47741
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2204/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Masahiro Kaneko, Danushka Bollegala, and Timothy Baldwin. 2026. A Multilingual Social Bias Benchmark Incorporating Thinking Processes. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 47726–47741, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Multilingual Social Bias Benchmark Incorporating Thinking Processes (Kaneko et al., ACL 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.2204.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.acl-long.2204.checklist.pdf
















