Explaining GAND: A Resource on Gender-Ambiguous Natural Data & Contrastive Attribution

Janiça Hackenbuchner, Jasper Degraeuwe, Arda Tezcan, Joke Daems


Abstract
Machine translation (MT) systems continue to produce gender-biased translations. In a time where self-expression is paramount, mistranslations based on default behaviour and stereotyping can lead to harm for users of these systems. To better understand how these systems translate gender in the absence of clear gender cues, we need benchmarking resources that reflect gender ambiguous scenarios in a natural way. To this end, we present GAND, a gender ambiguous natural data benchmarking resource for MT consisting of English source sentences, specifically designed to analyse the influence of contextual cues on gender in translation. We leverage GAND to conduct an interpretability analysis: we translate a subset of GAND into two grammatical gender languages and extend these with manually crafted contrastive translations. A following feature attribution analysis reveals source words in context that inform the gender translation of an ambiguous referent entity in the target translation. As a newly introduced resource, GAND is designed to be benchmarked across diverse target languages and evaluated with a wide range of MT systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.eamt-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2026
Address:
Tilburg, The Netherlands
Editors:
Dimitar Shterionov, Eva Vanmassenhove, Mirella De Sisto, Fred Blain, Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami, Lisa Lepp, Chiara Manna, Argentina Anna Rescigno, Alina Karakanta, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Manuel Lardelli, Natalia Resende, Elena Murgolo, Janiça Hackenbuchner, Anna Zaretskaya, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Dagmar Gromann, Rachel Bawden, Barry Haddow, Sara Szoc, Mikel Forcada, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
245–267
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.18/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Janiça Hackenbuchner, Jasper Degraeuwe, Arda Tezcan, and Joke Daems. 2026. Explaining GAND: A Resource on Gender-Ambiguous Natural Data & Contrastive Attribution. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 245–267, Tilburg, The Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Explaining GAND: A Resource on Gender-Ambiguous Natural Data & Contrastive Attribution (Hackenbuchner et al., EAMT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.18.pdf