Are Fairy Tales Fair? Analyzing Gender Bias in Temporal Narrative Event Chains of Children’s Fairy Tales
Paulina Toro Isaza, Guangxuan Xu, Toye Oloko, Yufang Hou, Nanyun Peng, Dakuo Wang
Abstract
Social biases and stereotypes are embedded in our culture in part through their presence in our stories, as evidenced by the rich history of humanities and social science literature analyzing such biases in children stories. Because these analyses are often conducted manually and at a small scale, such investigations can benefit from the use of more recent natural language processing (NLP) methods that examine social bias in models and data corpora. Our work joins this interdisciplinary effort and makes a unique contribution by taking into account the event narrative structures when analyzing the social bias of stories. We propose a computational pipeline that automatically extracts a story’s temporal narrative verb-based event chain for each of its characters as well as character attributes such as gender. We also present a verb-based event annotation scheme that can facilitate bias analysis by including categories such as those that align with traditional stereotypes. Through a case study analyzing gender bias in fairy tales, we demonstrate that our framework can reveal bias in not only the unigram verb-based events in which female and male characters participate but also in the temporal narrative order of such event participation.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.359
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6509–6531
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.359
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.359
- Cite (ACL):
- Paulina Toro Isaza, Guangxuan Xu, Toye Oloko, Yufang Hou, Nanyun Peng, and Dakuo Wang. 2023. Are Fairy Tales Fair? Analyzing Gender Bias in Temporal Narrative Event Chains of Children’s Fairy Tales. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6509–6531, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Are Fairy Tales Fair? Analyzing Gender Bias in Temporal Narrative Event Chains of Children’s Fairy Tales (Toro Isaza et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.acl-long.359.pdf