Gender Inflected or Bias Inflicted: On Using Grammatical Gender Cues for Bias Evaluation in Machine Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Singh, Pushpdeep
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Singh, Pushpdeep
author_facet Singh, Pushpdeep
contents Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are state-of-the-art for machine translation. However, these models are known to have various social biases, especially gender bias. Most of the work on evaluating gender bias in NMT has focused primarily on English as the source language. For source languages different from English, most of the studies use gender-neutral sentences to evaluate gender bias. However, practically, many sentences that we encounter do have gender information. Therefore, it makes more sense to evaluate for bias using such sentences. This allows us to determine if NMT models can identify the correct gender based on the grammatical gender cues in the source sentence rather than relying on biased correlations with, say, occupation terms. To demonstrate our point, in this work, we use Hindi as the source language and construct two sets of gender-specific sentences: OTSC-Hindi and WinoMT-Hindi that we use to evaluate different Hindi-English (HI-EN) NMT systems automatically for gender bias. Our work highlights the importance of considering the nature of language when designing such extrinsic bias evaluation datasets.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_03767
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gender Inflected or Bias Inflicted: On Using Grammatical Gender Cues for Bias Evaluation in Machine Translation
Singh, Pushpdeep
Computation and Language
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are state-of-the-art for machine translation. However, these models are known to have various social biases, especially gender bias. Most of the work on evaluating gender bias in NMT has focused primarily on English as the source language. For source languages different from English, most of the studies use gender-neutral sentences to evaluate gender bias. However, practically, many sentences that we encounter do have gender information. Therefore, it makes more sense to evaluate for bias using such sentences. This allows us to determine if NMT models can identify the correct gender based on the grammatical gender cues in the source sentence rather than relying on biased correlations with, say, occupation terms. To demonstrate our point, in this work, we use Hindi as the source language and construct two sets of gender-specific sentences: OTSC-Hindi and WinoMT-Hindi that we use to evaluate different Hindi-English (HI-EN) NMT systems automatically for gender bias. Our work highlights the importance of considering the nature of language when designing such extrinsic bias evaluation datasets.
title Gender Inflected or Bias Inflicted: On Using Grammatical Gender Cues for Bias Evaluation in Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03767