For the Misgendered Chinese in Gender Bias Research: Multi-Task Learning with Knowledge Distillation for Pinyin Name-Gender Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Du, Xiaocong, Zhang, Haipeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913345871806464
author Du, Xiaocong
Zhang, Haipeng
author_facet Du, Xiaocong
Zhang, Haipeng
contents Achieving gender equality is a pivotal factor in realizing the UN's Global Goals for Sustainable Development. Gender bias studies work towards this and rely on name-based gender inference tools to assign individual gender labels when gender information is unavailable. However, these tools often inaccurately predict gender for Chinese Pinyin names, leading to potential bias in such studies. With the growing participation of Chinese in international activities, this situation is becoming more severe. Specifically, current tools focus on pronunciation (Pinyin) information, neglecting the fact that the latent connections between Pinyin and Chinese characters (Hanzi) behind convey critical information. As a first effort, we formulate the Pinyin name-gender guessing problem and design a Multi-Task Learning Network assisted by Knowledge Distillation that enables the Pinyin embeddings in the model to possess semantic features of Chinese characters and to learn gender information from Chinese character names. Our open-sourced method surpasses commercial name-gender guessing tools by 9.70\% to 20.08\% relatively, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_06221
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle For the Misgendered Chinese in Gender Bias Research: Multi-Task Learning with Knowledge Distillation for Pinyin Name-Gender Prediction
Du, Xiaocong
Zhang, Haipeng
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Achieving gender equality is a pivotal factor in realizing the UN's Global Goals for Sustainable Development. Gender bias studies work towards this and rely on name-based gender inference tools to assign individual gender labels when gender information is unavailable. However, these tools often inaccurately predict gender for Chinese Pinyin names, leading to potential bias in such studies. With the growing participation of Chinese in international activities, this situation is becoming more severe. Specifically, current tools focus on pronunciation (Pinyin) information, neglecting the fact that the latent connections between Pinyin and Chinese characters (Hanzi) behind convey critical information. As a first effort, we formulate the Pinyin name-gender guessing problem and design a Multi-Task Learning Network assisted by Knowledge Distillation that enables the Pinyin embeddings in the model to possess semantic features of Chinese characters and to learn gender information from Chinese character names. Our open-sourced method surpasses commercial name-gender guessing tools by 9.70\% to 20.08\% relatively, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.
title For the Misgendered Chinese in Gender Bias Research: Multi-Task Learning with Knowledge Distillation for Pinyin Name-Gender Prediction
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06221