Word embeddings learned from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases.However, debias on the Chinese language, one of the most spoken languages, has been less explored.Meanwhile, existing literature relies on manually created supplementary data, which is time- and energy-consuming.In this work, we propose the first Chinese Gender-neutral word Embedding model (CGE) based on Word2vec, which learns gender-neutral word embeddings without any labeled data.Concretely, CGE utilizes and emphasizes the rich feminine and masculine information contained in radicals, i.e., a kind of component in Chinese characters, during the training procedure.This consequently alleviates discriminative gender biases.Experimental results on public benchmark datasets show that our unsupervised method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised debiased word embedding models without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.

Despite recent advancements in automated speech recognition (ASR) technologies, reports of unequal performance across speakers of different demographic groups abound. At the same time, the focus on performance metrics such as the Word Error Rate (WER) in prior studies limit the specificity and scope of recommendations that can be offered for system engineering to overcome these challenges. The current study bridges this gap by investigating the performance of Otter’s automatic captioning system on native and non-native English speakers of different language background through a linguistic analysis of segment-level errors. By examining language-specific error profiles for vowels and consonants motivated by linguistic theory, we find that certain categories of errors can be predicted from the phonological structure of a speaker’s native language.

Empirical natural language processing (NLP) systems in application domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, education) involve interoperation among multiple components, ranging from data ingestion, human annotation, to text retrieval, analysis, generation, and visualization. We establish a unified open-source framework to support fast development of such sophisticated NLP workflows in a composable manner. The framework introduces a uniform data representation to encode heterogeneous results by a wide range of NLP tasks. It offers a large repository of processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation, which can be easily assembled with full interoperability under the unified representation. The highly extensible framework allows plugging in custom processors from external off-the-shelf NLP and deep learning libraries. The whole framework is delivered through two modularized yet integratable open-source projects, namely Forte (for workflow infrastructure and NLP function processors) and Stave (for user interaction, visualization, and annotation).