Who Receives Respect? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Honorific Allocation Bias in Bengali

Ajwad Abrar, Md Kamrul Hasan, Hasan Mahmud

Bengali has no grammatical gender, but honorificity is obligatory: every third-person reference must choose ordinary or respectful register. English has no such signal, so the system must choose a level of deference that the source never specified. We use this property to measure how large language models (LLMs) allocate respect in English--Bengali translation. Our evaluation set contains 2{,}016 sentences across 72 occupations. Each appears in seven sentence frames under four pronoun conditions. Masculine and feminine versions differ by one word, forming counterfactual pairs. We report a single Honorific Bias Score (HBS) for each model on a 0--100 scale, covering both the gender and occupation axes. A lower score means that respect is allocated more evenly. For the occupation analysis, we compute each occupation's honorific rate across the seven no-pronoun sentence frames. The standard deviation of these 72 occupation-level rates ranges from 17.2 to 35.5 percentage points across models, showing substantial variation in how honorifics are allocated across occupations. Occupation is associated with 3.2\% to 51.5\% of the variance in register choice, compared with at most 1.2\% for…