Towards WinoQueer: Developing a Benchmark for Anti-Queer Bias in Large Language Models

Abstract: This paper presents exploratory work on whether and to what extent biases against queer and trans people are encoded in LLMs such as BERT. We also propose a method for reducing these biases in downstream tasks: finetuning the models on data written by and/or about queer people. To measure anti-queer bias, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, WinoQueer, modeled after other bias-detection benchmarks but addressing homophobic and transphobic biases. We found that BERT shows significant homophobic bias, but this bias can be mostly mitigated by finetuning BERT on a natural language corpus written by members of the LGBTQ+ community.