Are Non-English Papers Reviewed Fairly? Language-of-Study Bias in NLP Peer Reviews
Peer review plays a central role in the NLP publication process, but is susceptible to various biases. Here, we study language-of-study (LoS) bias: the tendency for reviewers to evaluate a paper differently based on the language(s) it studies, rather than its scientific merit. Despite being explicitly flagged in reviewing guidelines, such biases are poorly understood. Prior work treats such comments as part of broader categories of weak or unconstructive reviews without defining them as a distinct form of bias. We present the first systematic characterization of LoS bias, distinguishing negative and positive forms, and introduce the human-annotated dataset LOBSTER (Language-Of-study Bias ...
| Authors | Ehsan Barkhordar, Abdulfattah Safa, Verena Blaschke et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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