Ian Matroos


2018

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Bleaching Text: Abstract Features for Cross-lingual Gender Prediction
Rob van der Goot | Nikola Ljubešić | Ian Matroos | Malvina Nissim | Barbara Plank
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Gender prediction has typically focused on lexical and social network features, yielding good performance, but making systems highly language-, topic-, and platform dependent. Cross-lingual embeddings circumvent some of these limitations, but capture gender-specific style less. We propose an alternative: bleaching text, i.e., transforming lexical strings into more abstract features. This study provides evidence that such features allow for better transfer across languages. Moreover, we present a first study on the ability of humans to perform cross-lingual gender prediction. We find that human predictive power proves similar to that of our bleached models, and both perform better than lexical models.