How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns
Stephanie Brandl, Ruixiang Cui, Anders Søgaard
2022Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies13 citationsDOIOpen Access PDF
Abstract
Gender-neutral pronouns have recently been introduced in many languages to a) include non-binary people and b) as a generic singular. Recent results from psycholinguistics suggest that gender-neutral pronouns (in Swedish) are not associated with human processing difficulties. This, we show, is in sharp contrast with automated processing. We show that gender-neutral pronouns in Danish, English, and Swedish are associated with higher perplexity, more dispersed attention patterns, and worse downstream performance. We argue that such conservativity in language models may limit widespread adoption of gender-neutral pronouns and must therefore be resolved.
Topics & Concepts
Personal pronounPerplexityComputer sciencePsycholinguisticsLinguisticsGrammatical genderContrast (vision)DanishNatural language processingLanguage modelArtificial intelligencePsychologyPhilosophyNeuroscienceNounCognitionNatural Language Processing TechniquesGender Studies in LanguageText Readability and Simplification