Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronouns

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: van Boven, Goya, Du, Yupei, Nguyen, Dong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author van Boven, Goya
Du, Yupei
Nguyen, Dong
author_facet van Boven, Goya
Du, Yupei
Nguyen, Dong
contents Gender-neutral pronouns are increasingly being introduced across Western languages. Recent evaluations have however demonstrated that English NLP systems are unable to correctly process gender-neutral pronouns, with the risk of erasing and misgendering non-binary individuals. This paper examines a Dutch coreference resolution system's performance on gender-neutral pronouns, specifically hen and die. In Dutch, these pronouns were only introduced in 2016, compared to the longstanding existence of singular they in English. We additionally compare two debiasing techniques for coreference resolution systems in non-binary contexts: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) and delexicalisation. Moreover, because pronoun performance can be hard to interpret from a general evaluation metric like LEA, we introduce an innovative evaluation metric, the pronoun score, which directly represents the portion of correctly processed pronouns. Our results reveal diminished performance on gender-neutral pronouns compared to gendered counterparts. Nevertheless, although delexicalisation fails to yield improvements, CDA substantially reduces the performance gap between gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. We further show that CDA remains effective in low-resource settings, in which a limited set of debiasing documents is used. This efficacy extends to previously unseen neopronouns, which are currently infrequently used but may gain popularity in the future, underscoring the viability of effective debiasing with minimal resources and low computational costs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_00134
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronouns
van Boven, Goya
Du, Yupei
Nguyen, Dong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
Gender-neutral pronouns are increasingly being introduced across Western languages. Recent evaluations have however demonstrated that English NLP systems are unable to correctly process gender-neutral pronouns, with the risk of erasing and misgendering non-binary individuals. This paper examines a Dutch coreference resolution system's performance on gender-neutral pronouns, specifically hen and die. In Dutch, these pronouns were only introduced in 2016, compared to the longstanding existence of singular they in English. We additionally compare two debiasing techniques for coreference resolution systems in non-binary contexts: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) and delexicalisation. Moreover, because pronoun performance can be hard to interpret from a general evaluation metric like LEA, we introduce an innovative evaluation metric, the pronoun score, which directly represents the portion of correctly processed pronouns. Our results reveal diminished performance on gender-neutral pronouns compared to gendered counterparts. Nevertheless, although delexicalisation fails to yield improvements, CDA substantially reduces the performance gap between gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. We further show that CDA remains effective in low-resource settings, in which a limited set of debiasing documents is used. This efficacy extends to previously unseen neopronouns, which are currently infrequently used but may gain popularity in the future, underscoring the viability of effective debiasing with minimal resources and low computational costs.
title Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronouns
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00134