Title: Cultural Bias and Privacy Protection in Large Language Models 

Speaker: Prof. Wei Xu @ Georgia Tech

Time : 15:30 - 16:30, May 20th, 2025

Location: Hybrid

• In-person: 85613

• Online: https://hli.skku.edu/InvitedTalk250520-2 

Language: English speech & English slides

Abstract: 

 In this talk, I will explore two key aspects of large language models (LLMs) and their pre-training data: cultural bias and privacy preservation. First, I will present a systematic study on LLMs' favoritism toward Western culture. Our approach involves curating a dataset CAMEL of over 20,000 cultural items, including food, clothing, individuals, religious sites, and more, to contrast Arabic and Western cultures. We assess cultural biases across multilingual LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Aya) through natural prompts, story generation, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition tasks. A key finding suggests heavy reliance on Wikipedia data during pre-training may have contributed to the bias toward Western concepts in non-Western languages. 

Second, I will discuss our work on probabilistic reasoning for privacy protection, focusing on estimating the k-anonymity of user-generated text, such as social media posts or exchanges with ChatGPT. We introduce a novel probabilistic reasoning method that leverages LLMs to factorize a joint probability distribution and estimate the number of individuals matching a given set of attributes mentioned in the text. Additionally, we explore text-based disclosure abstraction as a proactive strategy for privacy preservation in PrivacyMirror, an AI-driven privacy protection tool we are developing. Our models detect and rephrase specific self-disclosures into more general terms while preserving their conversational utility. For example, the statement "I'm 16F" can be transformed into "I'm a teenage girl," reducing users' privacy risks while maintaining their intended meaning.

To conclude, I will briefly discuss recent research on the temporal robustness of LLMs, particularly their ability to handle neologisms, and advances in human-AI interactive evaluation. 

Bio:

Wei Xu is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing and Machine Learning Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she directs the NLP X Lab. Her research interests are in natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on Generative AI, robustness and multilinguality of large language models, and interdisciplinary research in AI for science, education, accessibility, and privacy. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Faculty Research Awards from Google, Sony, and Criteo, CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Award, Best Paper Awards and Honorable Mentions at COLING'18, ACL’23, and ACL’24. She also received research grants from NIH, DARPA, and IARPA.