Abstract:Despite being home to more than 1300 ethnic groups and 700 indigenous languages, bias in Large Language Models has not been fully studied in Indonesia, thus leaving a critical gap in evaluating representational fairness and localized stereotypes within its uniquely vast, multilingual, and diverse sociocultural landscape. To address this, we introduce IndoBias as a culturally-grounded bias benchmark to assess LLMs bias in Indonesian and three local languages: Javanese, Sundanese, and Makasar. IndoBias features dual perspective evaluation tracks: depth-oriented (with contrastive-pairs) and breadth-oriented (with generation-based), where the latter is grounded in social science frameworks (SPI, O*NET, and WGI). Our results show that existing LLMs -- particularly decoder models -- exhibit strong bias towards prototypical sentences in Indonesian, while local languages suffer higher bias under Ideology and Religion category. We also find that LLMs responses exhibit a non-uniform Stereotype Polarity when prompted with various local entities. Finally, we discover that, in Indonesian, Common Crawl texts introduce more bias during pretraining, compared to human-reviewed article texts (e.g., Wikipedia, News), whereas introducing local languages to pretraining generally increases bias. This work highlights the importance of studying bias in culture-specific context. Warning: This paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.




Abstract:This paper presents our approach for SemEval 2025 Task 11 Track A, focusing on multilabel emotion classification across 28 languages. We explore two main strategies: fully fine-tuning transformer models and classifier-only training, evaluating different settings such as fine-tuning strategies, model architectures, loss functions, encoders, and classifiers. Our findings suggest that training a classifier on top of prompt-based encoders such as mE5 and BGE yields significantly better results than fully fine-tuning XLMR and mBERT. Our best-performing model on the final leaderboard is an ensemble combining multiple BGE models, where CatBoost serves as the classifier, with different configurations. This ensemble achieves an average F1-macro score of 56.58 across all languages.