@inproceedings{corral-saralegi-2022-gender,
    title = "Gender Bias Mitigation for {NMT} Involving Genderless Languages",
    author = "Corral, Ander  and
      Saralegi, Xabier",
    editor = {Koehn, Philipp  and
      Barrault, Lo{\"i}c  and
      Bojar, Ond{\v{r}}ej  and
      Bougares, Fethi  and
      Chatterjee, Rajen  and
      Costa-juss{\`a}, Marta R.  and
      Federmann, Christian  and
      Fishel, Mark  and
      Fraser, Alexander  and
      Freitag, Markus  and
      Graham, Yvette  and
      Grundkiewicz, Roman  and
      Guzman, Paco  and
      Haddow, Barry  and
      Huck, Matthias  and
      Jimeno Yepes, Antonio  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Martins, Andr{\'e}  and
      Morishita, Makoto  and
      Monz, Christof  and
      Nagata, Masaaki  and
      Nakazawa, Toshiaki  and
      Negri, Matteo  and
      N{\'e}v{\'e}ol, Aur{\'e}lie  and
      Neves, Mariana  and
      Popel, Martin  and
      Turchi, Marco  and
      Zampieri, Marcos},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.wmt-1.10/",
    pages = "165--176",
    abstract = "It has been found that NMT systems have a strong preference towards social defaults and biases when translating certain occupations, which due to their widespread use, can unintentionally contribute to amplifying and perpetuating these patterns. In that sense, this work focuses on sentence-level gender agreement between gendered entities and occupations when translating from genderless languages to languages with grammatical gender. Specifically, we address the Basque to Spanish translation direction for which bias mitigation has not been addressed. Gender information in Basque is explicit in neither the grammar nor the morphology. It is only present in a limited number of gender specific common nouns and person proper names. We propose a template-based fine-tuning strategy with explicit gender tags to provide a stronger gender signal for the proper inflection of occupations. This strategy is compared against systems fine-tuned on real data extracted from Wikipedia biographies. We provide a detailed gender bias assessment analysis and perform a template ablation study to determine the optimal set of templates. We report a substantial gender bias mitigation (up to 50{\%} on gender bias scores) while keeping the original translation quality."
}