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Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Translation with Target Gender Annotations

Artūrs Stafanovičs, Toms Bergmanis, Mārcis Pinnis


Abstract
When translating “The secretary asked for details.” to a language with grammatical gender, it might be necessary to determine the gender of the subject “secretary”. If the sentence does not contain the necessary information, it is not always possible to disambiguate. In such cases, machine translation systems select the most common translation option, which often corresponds to the stereotypical translations, thus potentially exacerbating prejudice and marginalisation of certain groups and people. We argue that the information necessary for an adequate translation can not always be deduced from the sentence being translated or even might depend on external knowledge. Therefore, in this work, we propose to decouple the task of acquiring the necessary information from the task of learning to translate correctly when such information is available. To that end, we present a method for training machine translation systems to use word-level annotations containing information about subject’s gender. To prepare training data, we annotate regular source language words with grammatical gender information of the corresponding target language words. Using such data to train machine translation systems reduces their reliance on gender stereotypes when information about the subject’s gender is available. Our experiments on five language pairs show that this allows improving accuracy on the WinoMT test set by up to 25.8 percentage points.
Anthology ID:
2020.wmt-1.73
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Loïc Barrault, Ondřej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Yvette Graham, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, André Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
629–638
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.73
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Artūrs Stafanovičs, Toms Bergmanis, and Mārcis Pinnis. 2020. Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Translation with Target Gender Annotations. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 629–638, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Translation with Target Gender Annotations (Stafanovičs et al., WMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.wmt-1.73.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939614
Code
 artursstaf/mitigating-gender-bias-wmt-2020