Enhancing Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation with Neomorphemes and Large Language Models

Andrea Piergentili, Beatrice Savoldi, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli


Abstract
Machine translation (MT) models are known to suffer from gender bias, especially when translating into languages with extensive gendered morphology. Accordingly, they still fall short in using gender-inclusive language, also representative of non-binary identities. In this paper, we look at gender-inclusive neomorphemes, neologistic elements that avoid binary gender markings as an approach towards fairer MT. In this direction, we explore prompting techniques with large language models (LLMs) to translate from English into Italian using neomorphemes. So far, this area has been under-explored due to its novelty and the lack of publicly available evaluation resources. We fill this gap by releasing NEO-GATE, a resource designed to evaluate gender-inclusive en→it translation with neomorphemes. With NEO-GATE, we assess four LLMs of different families and sizes and different prompt formats, identifying strengths and weaknesses of each on this novel task for MT.
Anthology ID:
2024.eamt-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Sheffield, UK
Editors:
Carolina Scarton, Charlotte Prescott, Chris Bayliss, Chris Oakley, Joanna Wright, Stuart Wrigley, Xingyi Song, Edward Gow-Smith, Rachel Bawden, Víctor M Sánchez-Cartagena, Patrick Cadwell, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Vera Cabarrão, Konstantinos Chatzitheodorou, Mary Nurminen, Diptesh Kanojia, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Note:
Pages:
300–314
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.25
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrea Piergentili, Beatrice Savoldi, Matteo Negri, and Luisa Bentivogli. 2024. Enhancing Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation with Neomorphemes and Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 300–314, Sheffield, UK. European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT).
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation with Neomorphemes and Large Language Models (Piergentili et al., EAMT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eamt-1.25.pdf