In plain words: They created ways to measure gender bias in word-meaning maps for languages like Spanish and French, where words change form by gender, and adapted a fix that pulls male/female associations apart. The fix cut the bias while keeping word meanings and translations accurate.
Abstract
Recent studies have shown that word embeddings exhibit gender bias inherited from the training corpora. However, most studies to date have focused on quantifying and mitigating such bias only in English. These analyses cannot be directly extended to languages that exhibit morphological agreement on gender, such as Spanish and French. In this paper, we propose new metrics for evaluating gender bias in word embeddings of these languages and further demonstrate evidence of gender bias in bilingual embeddings which align these languages with English. Finally, we extend an existing approach to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings under both monolingual and bilingual settings. Experiments on modified Word Embedding Association Test, word similarity, word translation, and word pair translation tasks show that the proposed approaches effectively reduce the gender bias while preserving the utility of the embeddings.
Pei Zhou, Weijia Shi, Jieyu Zhao, Kuan-Hao Huang, Muhao Chen, Ryan Cotterell, Kai-Wei Chang
arXiv:1909.02224 · cs.CL · submitted Sep 5, 2019 · updated Sep 9, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 as a long paper