A Rewriting Approach for Gender Inclusivity in Portuguese

Leonor Veloso, Luisa Coheur, Rui Ribeiro

Abstract
In recent years, there has been a notable rise in research interest regarding the integration of gender-inclusive and gender-neutral language in natural language processing models. A specific area of focus that has gained practical and academic significant interest is gender-neutral rewriting, which involves converting binary-gendered text to its gender-neutral counterpart. However, current approaches to gender-neutral rewriting for gendered languages tend to rely on large datasets, which may not be an option for languages with fewer resources, such as Portuguese. In this paper, we present a rule-based and a neural-based tool for gender-neutral rewriting for Portuguese, a heavily gendered Romance language whose morphology creates different challenges from the ones tackled by other gender-neutral rewriters. Our neural approach relies on fine-tuning large multilingual machine translation models on examples generated by the rule-based model. We evaluate both models on texts from different sources and contexts. We provide the first Portuguese dataset explicitly containing gender-neutral language and neopronouns, as well as a manually annotated golden collection of 500 sentences that allows for evaluation of future work.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.585
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8747–8759
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.585
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.585
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leonor Veloso, Luisa Coheur, and Rui Ribeiro. 2023. A Rewriting Approach for Gender Inclusivity in Portuguese. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 8747–8759, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Rewriting Approach for Gender Inclusivity in Portuguese (Veloso et al., Findings 2023)
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