@inproceedings{mainardi-etal-2025-fine,
title = "Fine-Tuning vs Prompting Techniques for Gender-Fair Rewriting of Machine Translations",
author = "Mainardi, Paolo and
Garcea, Federico and
Barr{\'o}n-Cede{\~n}o, Alberto",
editor = "Fale{\'n}ska, Agnieszka and
Basta, Christine and
Costa-juss{\`a}, Marta and
Sta{\'n}czak, Karolina and
Nozza, Debora",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)",
month = aug,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.gebnlp-1.28/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.gebnlp-1.28",
pages = "320--337",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-277-0",
abstract = "Increasing attention is being dedicated by the NLP community to gender-fair practices, including emerging forms of non-binary language. Given the shift to the prompting paradigm for multiple tasks, direct comparisons between prompted and fine-tuned models in this context are lacking. We aim to fill this gap by comparing prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques for gender-fair rewriting in Italian. We do so by framing a rewriting task where Italian gender-marked translations from English gender-ambiguous sentences are adapted into a gender-neutral alternative using direct non-binary language. We augment existing datasets with gender-neutral translations and conduct experiments to determine the best architecture and approach to complete such task, by fine-tuning and prompting seq2seq encoder-decoder and autoregressive decoder-only models. We show that smaller seq2seq models can reach good performance when fine-tuned, even with relatively little data; when it comes to prompts, including task demonstrations is crucial, and we find that chat-tuned models reach the best results in a few-shot setting. We achieve promising results, especially in contexts of limited data and resources."
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<abstract>Increasing attention is being dedicated by the NLP community to gender-fair practices, including emerging forms of non-binary language. Given the shift to the prompting paradigm for multiple tasks, direct comparisons between prompted and fine-tuned models in this context are lacking. We aim to fill this gap by comparing prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques for gender-fair rewriting in Italian. We do so by framing a rewriting task where Italian gender-marked translations from English gender-ambiguous sentences are adapted into a gender-neutral alternative using direct non-binary language. We augment existing datasets with gender-neutral translations and conduct experiments to determine the best architecture and approach to complete such task, by fine-tuning and prompting seq2seq encoder-decoder and autoregressive decoder-only models. We show that smaller seq2seq models can reach good performance when fine-tuned, even with relatively little data; when it comes to prompts, including task demonstrations is crucial, and we find that chat-tuned models reach the best results in a few-shot setting. We achieve promising results, especially in contexts of limited data and resources.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Fine-Tuning vs Prompting Techniques for Gender-Fair Rewriting of Machine Translations
%A Mainardi, Paolo
%A Garcea, Federico
%A Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto
%Y Faleńska, Agnieszka
%Y Basta, Christine
%Y Costa-jussà, Marta
%Y Stańczak, Karolina
%Y Nozza, Debora
%S Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
%D 2025
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-277-0
%F mainardi-etal-2025-fine
%X Increasing attention is being dedicated by the NLP community to gender-fair practices, including emerging forms of non-binary language. Given the shift to the prompting paradigm for multiple tasks, direct comparisons between prompted and fine-tuned models in this context are lacking. We aim to fill this gap by comparing prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques for gender-fair rewriting in Italian. We do so by framing a rewriting task where Italian gender-marked translations from English gender-ambiguous sentences are adapted into a gender-neutral alternative using direct non-binary language. We augment existing datasets with gender-neutral translations and conduct experiments to determine the best architecture and approach to complete such task, by fine-tuning and prompting seq2seq encoder-decoder and autoregressive decoder-only models. We show that smaller seq2seq models can reach good performance when fine-tuned, even with relatively little data; when it comes to prompts, including task demonstrations is crucial, and we find that chat-tuned models reach the best results in a few-shot setting. We achieve promising results, especially in contexts of limited data and resources.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.gebnlp-1.28
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.gebnlp-1.28/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.gebnlp-1.28
%P 320-337
Markdown (Informal)
[Fine-Tuning vs Prompting Techniques for Gender-Fair Rewriting of Machine Translations](https://aclanthology.org/2025.gebnlp-1.28/) (Mainardi et al., GeBNLP 2025)
ACL