Mean Machine Translations: On Gender Bias in Icelandic Machine Translations

Agnes Sólmundsdóttir, Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir, Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir, Anton Ingason


Abstract
This paper examines machine bias in language technology. Machine bias can affect machine learning algorithms when language models trained on large corpora include biased human decisions or reflect historical or social inequities, e.g. regarding gender and race. The focus of the paper is on gender bias in machine translation and we discuss a study conducted on Icelandic translations in the translation systems Google Translate and Vélþýðing.is. The results show a pattern which corresponds to certain societal ideas about gender. For example it seems to depend on the meaning of adjectives referring to people whether they appear in the masculine or feminine form. Adjectives describing positive personality traits were more likely to appear in masculine gender whereas the negative ones frequently appear in feminine gender. However, the opposite applied to appearance related adjectives. These findings unequivocally demonstrate the importance of being vigilant towards technology so as not to maintain societal inequalities and outdated views — especially in today’s digital world.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.333
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3113–3121
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.333
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Agnes Sólmundsdóttir, Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir, Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir, and Anton Ingason. 2022. Mean Machine Translations: On Gender Bias in Icelandic Machine Translations. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3113–3121, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Mean Machine Translations: On Gender Bias in Icelandic Machine Translations (Sólmundsdóttir et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.333.pdf