Women, Infamous, and Exotic Beings: A Comparative Study of Honorific Usages in Wikipedia and LLMs for Bengali and Hindi
Mukherjee, Sourabrata Mehta, Atharva Saha, Sougata Arora, Akhil Choudhury, Monojit
Mukherjee, Sourabrata
Mehta, Atharva
Saha, Sougata
Arora, Akhil
Choudhury, Monojit
Supervisor
Department
Natural Language Processing
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Type
Conference proceeding
Date
2025
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Language
English
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Abstract
The obligatory use of third-person honorifics is a distinctive feature of several South Asian languages, encoding nuanced socio-pragmatic cues such as power, age, gender, fame, and social distance.In this work, (i) We present the first large-scale study of third-person honorific pronoun and verb usage across 10,000 Hindi and Bengali Wikipedia articles with annotations linked to key socio-demographic attributes of the subjects, including gender, age group, fame, and cultural origin.(ii) Our analysis uncovers systematic intra-language regularities but notable cross-linguistic differences: honorifics are more prevalent in Bengali than in Hindi, while non-honorifics dominate while referring to infamous, juvenile, and culturally “exotic” entities. Notably, in both languages, and more prominently in Hindi, men are more frequently addressed with honorifics than women.(iii) To examine whether large language models (LLMs) internalize similar socio-pragmatic norms, we probe six LLMs using controlled generation and translation tasks over 1,000 culturally balanced entities. We find that LLMs diverge from Wikipedia usage, exhibiting alternative preferences in honorific selection across tasks, languages, and socio-demographic attributes. These discrepancies highlight gaps in the socio-cultural alignment of LLMs and open new directions for studying how LLMs acquire, adapt, or distort social-linguistic norms. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/souro/honorific-wiki-llm
Citation
S. Mukherjee, A. Mehta, S. Saha, A. Arora, and M. Choudhury, “Women, Infamous, and Exotic Beings: A Comparative Study of Honorific Usages in Wikipedia and LLMs for Bengali and Hindi,” Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 19114–19137, 2025, doi: 10.18653/V1/2025.EMNLP-MAIN.966
Source
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Conference
2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Keywords
Honorific Usage, Multilingual Wikipedia, Hindi and Bengali, Socio-demographic Dimensions, Large Language Models, Cultural Pragmatics, Cross-lingual Comparison, Socio-linguistic Norms
Subjects
Source
2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics