What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Study

Beatrice Savoldi, Sara Papi, Matteo Negri, Ana Guerberof-Arenas, Luisa Bentivogli


Abstract
Gender bias in machine translation (MT) is recognized as an issue that can harm people and society. And yet, advancements in the field rarely involve people, the final MT users, or inform how they might be impacted by biased technologies. Current evaluations are often restricted to automatic methods, which offer an opaque estimate of what the downstream impact of gender disparities might be. We conduct an extensive human-centered study to examine if and to what extent bias in MT brings harms with tangible costs, such as quality of service gaps across women and men. To this aim, we collect behavioral data from ~90 participants, who post-edited MT outputs to ensure correct gender translation. Across multiple datasets, languages, and types of users, our study shows that feminine post-editing demands significantly more technical and temporal effort, also corresponding to higher financial costs. Existing bias measurements, however, fail to reflect the found disparities. Our findings advocate for human-centered approaches that can inform the societal impact of bias.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1002
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18048–18076
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1002
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Beatrice Savoldi, Sara Papi, Matteo Negri, Ana Guerberof-Arenas, and Luisa Bentivogli. 2024. What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Study. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 18048–18076, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Study (Savoldi et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1002.pdf