Abstract
For many languages, Wikipedia is the most accessible source of biographical information. Studying how Wikipedia describes the lives of people can provide insights into societal biases, as well as cultural differences more generally. We present a method for extracting datasets of Wikipedia biographies. The accompanying codebase is adapted to English, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, and Farsi, and is extendable to other languages. We present an exploratory analysis of biographical topics and gendered patterns in four languages using topic modelling and embedding clustering. We find similarities across languages in the types of categories present, with the distribution of biographies concentrated in the language’s core regions. Masculine terms are over-represented and spread out over a wide variety of topics. Feminine terms are less frequent and linked to more constrained topics. Non-binary terms are nearly non-represented.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.ranlp-1.32
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Varna, Bulgaria
- Editors:
- Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
- Venue:
- RANLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
- Note:
- Pages:
- 285–294
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.32
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Hannah Devinney, Anton Eklund, Igor Ryazanov, and Jingwen Cai. 2023. Developing a Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 285–294, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
- Cite (Informal):
- Developing a Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies (Devinney et al., RANLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2023.ranlp-1.32.pdf