Abstract
As a large how-to website, wikiHow’s mission is to empower every person on the planet to learn how to do anything. An important part of including everyone also linguistically is the use of gender-neutral language. In this short paper, we study in how far articles from wikiHow fulfill this criterion based on manual annotation and automatic classification. In particular, we employ a classifier to analyze how the use of gender-neutral language has developed over time. Our results show that although about 75% of all articles on wikiHow were written in a gender-neutral way from the outset, revisions have a higher tendency to add gender-specific language than to change it to inclusive wording.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.ltedi-1.10
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julian's, Malta
- Editors:
- Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Bharathi B, Paul Buitelaar, Thenmozhi Durairaj, György Kovács, Miguel Ángel García Cumbreras
- Venues:
- LTEDI | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 118–123
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.ltedi-1.10
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Katharina Suhr and Michael Roth. 2024. A Diachronic Analysis of Gender-Neutral Language on wikiHow. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, pages 118–123, St. Julian's, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Diachronic Analysis of Gender-Neutral Language on wikiHow (Suhr & Roth, LTEDI-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2024.ltedi-1.10.pdf