Jetske Adams


2022

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Doing not Being: Concrete Language as a Bridge from Language Technology to Ethnically Inclusive Job Ads
Jetske Adams | Kyrill Poelmans | Iris Hendrickx | Martha Larson
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

This paper makes the case for studying concreteness in language as a bridge that will allow language technology to support the understanding and improvement of ethnic inclusivity in job advertisements. We propose an annotation scheme that guides the assignment of sentences in job ads to classes that reflect concrete actions, i.e., what the employer needs people to do, and abstract dispositions, i.e., who the employer expects people to be. Using an annotated dataset of Dutch-language job ads, we demonstrate that machine learning technology is effectively able to distinguish these classes.