ACL2026
A Multilingual Social Bias Benchmark Incorporating Thinking Processes
Masahiro Kaneko, Danushka Bollegala, Timothy Baldwin
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 1 , a multilingual social bias benchmark that incorporates humangenerated 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 finetuning. 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.