Lower performance for some languages and social groups

"LMs perform less well in some languages (Joshi et al., 2021; Ruder, 2020)...LM that more accurately captures the language use of one group, compared to another, may result in lower-quality language technologies for the latter. Disadvantaging users based on such traits may be particularly pernicious because attributes such as social class or education background are not typically covered as ‘protected characteristics’ in anti-discrimination law."

"LMs are typically trained in few languages, and perform less well in other languages [95, 162]. In part, this is due to unavailability of training data: there are many widely spoken languages for which no systematic efforts have been made to create labelled training datasets, such as Javanese which is spoken by more than 80 million people [95]. Training data is particularly missing for languages that are spoken by groups who are multilingual and can use a technology in English, or for languages spoken by groups who are not the primary target demographic for new technologies."