Abstract
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.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.naacl-main.265
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3624–3630
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.265
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.265
- Cite (ACL):
- Stephanie Brandl, Ruixiang Cui, and Anders Søgaard. 2022. How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3624–3630, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns (Brandl et al., NAACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2022.naacl-main.265.pdf
- Code
- stephaniebrandl/gender-neutral-pronouns
- Data
- MultiNLI