Gender Coreference and Bias Evaluation at WMT 2020

Tom Kocmi, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Gabriel Stanovsky


Abstract
Gender bias in machine translation can manifest when choosing gender inflections based on spurious gender correlations. For example, always translating doctors as men and nurses as women. This can be particularly harmful as models become more popular and deployed within commercial systems. Our work presents the largest evidence for the phenomenon in more than 19 systems submitted to the WMT over four diverse target languages: Czech, German, Polish, and Russian. To achieve this, we use WinoMT, a recent automatic test suite which examines gender coreference and bias when translating from English to languages with grammatical gender. We extend WinoMT to handle two new languages tested in WMT: Polish and Czech. We find that all systems consistently use spurious correlations in the data rather than meaningful contextual information.
Anthology ID:
2020.wmt-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Loïc Barrault, Ondřej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Yvette Graham, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, André Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
357–364
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.39
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tom Kocmi, Tomasz Limisiewicz, and Gabriel Stanovsky. 2020. Gender Coreference and Bias Evaluation at WMT 2020. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 357–364, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gender Coreference and Bias Evaluation at WMT 2020 (Kocmi et al., WMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.39.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939659
Data
WMT 2020