Type B Reflexivization as an Unambiguous Testbed for Multilingual Multi-Task Gender Bias

Ana Valeria González, Maria Barrett, Rasmus Hvingelby, Kellie Webster, Anders Søgaard


Abstract
The one-sided focus on English in previous studies of gender bias in NLP misses out on opportunities in other languages: English challenge datasets such as GAP and WinoGender highlight model preferences that are “hallucinatory”, e.g., disambiguating gender-ambiguous occurrences of ‘doctor’ as male doctors. We show that for languages with type B reflexivization, e.g., Swedish and Russian, we can construct multi-task challenge datasets for detecting gender bias that lead to unambiguously wrong model predictions: In these languages, the direct translation of ‘the doctor removed his mask’ is not ambiguous between a coreferential reading and a disjoint reading. Instead, the coreferential reading requires a non-gendered pronoun, and the gendered, possessive pronouns are anti-reflexive. We present a multilingual, multi-task challenge dataset, which spans four languages and four NLP tasks and focuses only on this phenomenon. We find evidence for gender bias across all task-language combinations and correlate model bias with national labor market statistics.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.209
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2637–2648
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.209
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.209
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ana Valeria González, Maria Barrett, Rasmus Hvingelby, Kellie Webster, and Anders Søgaard. 2020. Type B Reflexivization as an Unambiguous Testbed for Multilingual Multi-Task Gender Bias. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 2637–2648, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Type B Reflexivization as an Unambiguous Testbed for Multilingual Multi-Task Gender Bias (González et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.209.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938689
Code
 anavaleriagonzalez/ABC-dataset +  additional community code
Data
GAP Coreference DatasetUniversal DependenciesXNLI