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Debora Nozza

12 accepted papers

2025

Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children’s Stories

EMNLP 2025

Stories play a pivotal role in human communication, shaping beliefs and morals, particularly in children. As parents increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) to craft bedtime stories, the presence of cultural and gender stereotypes in these narratives raises significant concerns. To address

2025

Can I Introduce My Boyfriend to My Grandmother? Evaluating Large Language Models Capabilities on Iranian Social Norm Classification

NAACL 2025findings

Creating globally inclusive AI systems demands datasets reflecting diverse social norms. Iran, with its unique cultural blend, offers an ideal case study, with Farsi adding linguistic complexity. In this work, we introduce the Iranian Social Norms (ISN) dataset, a novel collection of 1,699 Iranian s…

2025

The “r” in “woman” stands for rights. Auditing LLMs in Uncovering Social Dynamics in Implicit Misogyny

EMNLP 2025

Persistent societal biases like misogyny express themselves more often implicitly than through openly hostile language.However, previous misogyny studies have focused primarily on explicit language, overlooking these more subtle forms. We bridge this gap by examining implicit misogynistic expression

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Metrics for What, Metrics for Whom: Assessing Actionability of Bias Evaluation Metrics in NLP

EMNLP 2024main

This paper introduces the concept of actionability in the context of bias measures in natural language processing (NLP). We define actionability as the degree to which a measure’s results enable informed action and propose a set of desiderata for assessing it. Building on existing frameworks such as…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Tale of Pronouns: Interpretability Informs Gender Bias Mitigation for Fairer Instruction-Tuned Machine Translation

EMNLP 2023long main

Recent instruction fine-tuned models can solve multiple NLP tasks when prompted to do so, with machine translation (MT) being a prominent use case. However, current research often focuses on standard performance benchmarks, leaving compelling fairness and ethical considerations behind. In MT, this m…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

The State of Profanity Obfuscation in Natural Language Processing Scientific Publications

ACL 2023findings

Work on hate speech has made considering rude and harmful examples in scientific publications inevitable. This situation raises various problems, such as whether or not to obscure profanities. While science must accurately disclose what it does, the unwarranted spread of hate speech can harm readers…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

What about “em”? How Commercial Machine Translation Fails to Handle (Neo-)Pronouns

ACL 2023long

As 3rd-person pronoun usage shifts to include novel forms, e.g., neopronouns, we need more research on identity-inclusive NLP. Exclusion is particularly harmful in one of the most popular NLP applications, machine translation (MT). Wrong pronoun translations can discriminate against marginalized gro…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2022

Data-Efficient Strategies for Expanding Hate Speech Detection into Under-Resourced Languages

EMNLP 2022main

Hate speech is a global phenomenon, but most hate speech datasets so far focus on English-language content. This hinders the development of more effective hate speech detection models in hundreds of languages spoken by billions across the world. More data is needed, but annotating hateful content is…

2022

Entropy-based Attention Regularization Frees Unintended Bias Mitigation from Lists

ACL 2022findings

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models risk overfitting to specific terms in the training data, thereby reducing their performance, fairness, and generalizability. E.g., neural hate speech detection models are strongly influenced by identity terms like gay, or women, resulting in false positives,…

2021

HONEST: Measuring Hurtful Sentence Completion in Language Models

NAACL 2021long

Language models have revolutionized the field of NLP. However, language models capture and proliferate hurtful stereotypes, especially in text generation. Our results show that 4.3% of the time, language models complete a sentence with a hurtful word. These cases are not random, but follow language…