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A Survey on Stereotype Detection in Natural Language Processing

  • Alessandra Teresa Cignarella*
  • , Anastasia Giachanou
  • , Els Lefever
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Stereotypes influence social perceptions and can escalate into discrimination and violence. While NLP research has extensively addressed gender bias and hate speech, stereotype detection remains an emerging field with significant societal implications. This work presents a survey of existing research, drawing on definitions from psychology, sociology, and philosophy. A semi-automatic literature review was conducted using Semantic Scholar, through which over 6,000 papers (published between 2000–2025) were retrieved and filtered. The analysis identifies key trends, methodologies, challenges, and future directions. The findings emphasize the potential of stereotype detection as an early-monitoring tool to prevent bias escalation and the rise of hate speech. The conclusions call for a broader, multilingual, and intersectional approach in NLP studies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number135
Pages (from-to)1-33
JournalACM Computing Surveys
Volume58
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 Nov 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

  1. SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
    SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Keywords

  • gender bias
  • hate speech
  • intersectionality
  • literature review
  • natural language processing
  • social psychology
  • Stereotype detection
  • survey

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