How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns
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Gender-neutral pronouns have recently been introduced in many languages to a) include non-binary people and b) as a generic singular. Recent results from psycholinguistics suggest that gender-neutral pronouns (in Swedish) are not associated with human processing difficulties. This, we show, is in sharp contrast with automated processing. We show that gender-neutral pronouns in Danish, English, and Swedish are associated with higher perplexity, more dispersed attention patterns, and worse downstream performance. We argue that such conservativity in language models may limit widespread adoption of gender-neutral pronouns and must therefore be resolved.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | NAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics : Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Publication date | 2022 |
Pages | 3624-3630 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781955917711 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Event | 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States Duration: 10 Jul 2022 → 15 Jul 2022 |
Conference
Conference | 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 |
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Land | United States |
By | Seattle |
Periode | 10/07/2022 → 15/07/2022 |
Sponsor | Amazon, Bloomberg, et al., Google Research, LIVE PERSON, Meta |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.
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