Is Gender Reference Gender-specific? Studies in a Polar Domain

Manfred Klenner, Dylan Massey

Abstract
We investigate how gender authorship influences polar, i.e. positive and negative gender reference. Given German-language newspaper texts where the full name of the authors are known and their gender can be inferred from the first names. And given that nouns in the text have gender reference, i.e. are labeled by a gender classifier as female or male denoting nouns. If these nouns carry a polar load, they count towards the gender-specific statistics we are interested in. A polar load is given either via phrase-level sentiment composition, or by a verb-based analysis of the polar role a noun (phrase) plays: is it framed by the verb as a positive or negative actor, or as receiving a positive or negative effect? Also, reported gender-gender relations (in favor, against) might be gender-specific. Statistical hypothesis testing is carried out in order to find out whether significant gender-wise correlations exist. We found that, in fact, gender reference is gender-specific: each gender significantly more often focuses on their own gender than the other one and e.g. positive actorship supremacy is claimed (intra-) gender-wise.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.814
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
9315–9324
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.814
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Manfred Klenner and Dylan Massey. 2024. Is Gender Reference Gender-specific? Studies in a Polar Domain. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 9315–9324, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Is Gender Reference Gender-specific? Studies in a Polar Domain (Klenner & Massey, LREC-COLING 2024)
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