On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns
Abstract
Ethics regarding social bias has recently thrown striking issues in natural language processing. Especially for gender-related topics, the need for a system that reduces the model bias has grown in areas such as image captioning, content recommendation, and automated employment. However, detection and evaluation of gender bias in the machine translation systems are not yet thoroughly investigated, for the task being cross-lingual and challenging to define. In this paper, we propose a scheme for making up a test set that evaluates the gender bias in a machine translation system, with Korean, a language with gender-neutral pronouns. Three word/phrase sets are primarily constructed, each incorporating positive/negative expressions or occupations; all the terms are gender-independent or at least not biased to one side severely. Then, additional sentence lists are constructed concerning formality of the pronouns and politeness of the sentences. With the generated sentence set of size 4,236 in total, we evaluate gender bias in conventional machine translation systems utilizing the proposed measure, which is termed here as translation gender bias index (TGBI). The corpus and the code for evaluation is available on-line.- Anthology ID:
- W19-3824
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Editors:
- Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Hardmeier, Will Radford, Kellie Webster
- Venue:
- GeBNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 173–181
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W19-3824
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W19-3824
- Cite (ACL):
- Won Ik Cho, Ji Won Kim, Seok Min Kim, and Nam Soo Kim. 2019. On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 173–181, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns (Cho et al., GeBNLP 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/W19-3824.pdf
- Code
- nolongerprejudice/tgbi