Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling
Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Hanna Wallach, Isabelle Augenstein, Ryan Cotterell
Abstract
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female politicians. In this paper, we aim not to merely study this phenomenon qualitatively, but instead to quantify the degree to which the language used to describe men and women is different and, moreover, different in a positive or negative way. To that end, we introduce a generative latent-variable model that jointly represents adjective (or verb) choice, with its sentiment, given the natural gender of a head (or dependent) noun. We find that there are significant differences between descriptions of male and female nouns and that these differences align with common gender stereotypes: Positive adjectives used to describe women are more often related to their bodies than adjectives used to describe men.- Anthology ID:
- P19-1167
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Editors:
- Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1706–1716
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/P19-1167
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/P19-1167
- Cite (ACL):
- Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Hanna Wallach, Isabelle Augenstein, and Ryan Cotterell. 2019. Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1706–1716, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling (Hoyle et al., ACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/P19-1167.pdf