Gender Neutralization for an Inclusive Machine Translation: from Theoretical Foundations to Open Challenges
Andrea Piergentili, Dennis Fucci, Beatrice Savoldi, Luisa Bentivogli, Matteo Negri
Abstract
Gender inclusivity in language technologies has become a prominent research topic. In this study, we explore gender-neutral translation (GNT) as a form of gender inclusivity and a goal to be achieved by machine translation (MT) models, which have been found to perpetuate gender bias and discrimination. Specifically, we focus on translation from English into Italian, a language pair representative of salient gender-related linguistic transfer problems. To define GNT, we review a selection of relevant institutional guidelines for gender-inclusive language, discuss its scenarios of use, and examine the technical challenges of performing GNT in MT, concluding with a discussion of potential solutions to encourage advancements toward greater inclusivity in MT.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.gitt-1.7
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Tampere, Finland
- Editors:
- Eva Vanmassenhove, Beatrice Savoldi, Luisa Bentivogli, Joke Daems, Janiça Hackenbuchner
- Venue:
- GITT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Association for Machine Translation
- Note:
- Pages:
- 71–83
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.gitt-1.7
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Andrea Piergentili, Dennis Fucci, Beatrice Savoldi, Luisa Bentivogli, and Matteo Negri. 2023. Gender Neutralization for an Inclusive Machine Translation: from Theoretical Foundations to Open Challenges. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies, pages 71–83, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
- Cite (Informal):
- Gender Neutralization for an Inclusive Machine Translation: from Theoretical Foundations to Open Challenges (Piergentili et al., GITT 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2023.gitt-1.7.pdf