Lina Conti


2023

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Using Artificial French Data to Understand the Emergence of Gender Bias in Transformer Language Models
Lina Conti | Guillaume Wisniewski
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Numerous studies have demonstrated the ability of neural language models to learn various linguistic properties without direct supervision. This work takes an initial step towards exploring the less researched topic of how neural models discover linguistic properties of words, such as gender, as well as the rules governing their usage. We propose to use an artificial corpus generated by a PCFG based on French to precisely control the gender distribution in the training data and determine under which conditions a model correctly captures gender information or, on the contrary, appears gender-biased.