Gender inequality represents a considerable loss of human potential and perpetuates a culture of violence, higher gender wage gaps, and a lack of representation of women in higher and leadership positions. Applications powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly being used in the real world to provide critical decisions about who is going to be hired, granted a loan, admitted to college, etc. However, the main pillars of AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) have been shown to reflect and even amplify gender biases and stereotypes, which are mainly inherited from historical training data. In an effort to facilitate the identification and mitigation of gender bias in English text, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy that relies on the following gender bias types: Generic Pronouns, Sexism, Occupational Bias, Exclusionary Bias, and Semantics. We also provide a bottom-up overview of gender bias, from its societal origin to its spillover onto language. Finally, we link the societal implications of gender bias to their corresponding type(s) in the proposed taxonomy. The underlying motivation of our work is to help enable the technical community to identify and mitigate relevant biases from training corpora for improved fairness in NLP systems.

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems specialized for one domain often perform poorly when applied to other domains. Domain adaptation techniques allow SMT models trained from a source domain with abundant data to accommodate different target domains with limited data. This paper evaluates the performance of two adaptive techniques based on log-linear and mixture models on data from the legal domain in real-world settings. Performance evaluation includes post-editing time and effort required by a professional post-editor to improve the quality of machine-generated translations to meet industry standards, as well as traditional automated scoring techniques (BLEU scores). Results indicates that the domain adaptation techniques can yield a significant increase in BLEU score (up to three points) and a significant reduction in post-editing time of about one second per word in an operational environment.