HEARTS: A Holistic Framework for Explainable, Sustainable and Robust Text Stereotype Detection

Stereotypes are generalised assumptions about societal groups, and even state-of-the-art LLMs using in-context learning struggle to identify them accurately. Due to the subjective nature of stereotypes, where what constitutes a stereotype can vary widely depending on cultural, social, and individual perspectives, robust explainability is crucial. Explainable models ensure that these nuanced judgments can be understood and validated by human users, promoting trust and accountability. We address these challenges by introducing HEARTS (Holistic Framework for Explainable, Sustainable, and Robust Text Stereotype Detection), a framework that enhances model performance, minimises carbon footprint, and provides transparent, interpretable explanations. We establish the Expanded Multi-Grain Stereotype Dataset (EMGSD), comprising 57,201 labeled texts across six groups, including under-represented demographics like LGBTQ+ and regional stereotypes. Ablation studies confirm that BERT models fine-tuned on EMGSD outperform those trained on individual components. We then analyse a fine-tuned, carbon-efficient ALBERT-V2 model using SHAP to generate token-level importance values, ensuring alignment with human understanding, and calculate explainability confidence scores by comparing SHAP and LIME outputs. Finally, HEARTS is applied to assess stereotypical bias in 12 LLM outputs, revealing a gradual reduction in bias over time within model families.