Jules Watson


2025

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Analyzing values about gendered language reform in LLMs’ revisions
Jules Watson | Xi Wang | Raymond Liu | Suzanne Stevenson | Barend Beekhuizen
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Within the common LLM use case of text revision, we study LLMs’ revision of gendered role nouns (e.g., outdoorsperson/woman/man) and their justifications of such revisions. We evaluate their alignment with feminist and trans-inclusive language reforms for English. Drawing on insight from sociolinguistics, we further assess if LLMs are sensitive to the same contextual effects in the application of such reforms as people are, finding broad evidence of such effects. We discuss implications for value alignment.