Type B Reflexivization as an Unambiguous Testbed for Multilingual Multi-Task Gender Bias

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The one-sided focus on English in previous studies of gender bias in NLP misses out on opportunities in other languages: English challenge datasets such as GAP and WinoGender highlight model preferences that are “hallucinatory”, e.g., disambiguating gender-ambiguous occurrences of ‘doctor’ as male doctors. We show that for languages with type B reflexivization, e.g., Swedish and Russian, we can construct multi-task challenge datasets for detecting gender bias that lead to unambiguously wrong model predictions: In these languages, the direct translation of ‘the doctor removed his mask’ is not ambiguous between a coreferential reading and a disjoint reading. Instead, the coreferential reading requires a non-gendered pronoun, and the gendered, possessive pronouns are anti-reflexive. We present a multilingual, multi-task challenge dataset, which spans four languages and four NLP tasks and focuses only on this phenomenon. We find evidence for gender bias across all task-language combinations and correlate model bias with national labor market statistics.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2020
Pages2637–2648
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
EventThe 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - online
Duration: 16 Nov 202020 Nov 2020
http://2020.emnlp.org

Conference

ConferenceThe 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Locationonline
Periode16/11/202020/11/2020
Internetadresse

ID: 258399669