On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns

Won Ik Cho, Ji Won Kim, Seok Min Kim, Nam Soo Kim


Abstract
Ethics regarding social bias has recently thrown striking issues in natural language processing. Especially for gender-related topics, the need for a system that reduces the model bias has grown in areas such as image captioning, content recommendation, and automated employment. However, detection and evaluation of gender bias in the machine translation systems are not yet thoroughly investigated, for the task being cross-lingual and challenging to define. In this paper, we propose a scheme for making up a test set that evaluates the gender bias in a machine translation system, with Korean, a language with gender-neutral pronouns. Three word/phrase sets are primarily constructed, each incorporating positive/negative expressions or occupations; all the terms are gender-independent or at least not biased to one side severely. Then, additional sentence lists are constructed concerning formality of the pronouns and politeness of the sentences. With the generated sentence set of size 4,236 in total, we evaluate gender bias in conventional machine translation systems utilizing the proposed measure, which is termed here as translation gender bias index (TGBI). The corpus and the code for evaluation is available on-line.
Anthology ID:
W19-3824
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Hardmeier, Will Radford, Kellie Webster
Venue:
GeBNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
173–181
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3824
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-3824
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Won Ik Cho, Ji Won Kim, Seok Min Kim, and Nam Soo Kim. 2019. On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 173–181, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns (Cho et al., GeBNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3824.pdf
Code
 nolongerprejudice/tgbi