Analyzing values about gendered language reform in LLMs’ revisions

Jules Watson; Xi Wang; Raymond Liu; Suzanne Stevenson; Barend Beekhuizen

EMNLP 20250 citations

Analyzing values about gendered language reform in LLMs’ revisions

Jules Watson, Xi Wang, Raymond Liu, Suzanne Stevenson, Barend Beekhuizen

Abstract

Within the common LLM use case of text revision, we study LLMs’ revision of gendered role nouns (e.g., outdoorsperson/woman/man) and their justifications of such revisions. We evaluate their alignment with feminist and trans-inclusive language reforms for English. Drawing on insight from sociolinguistics, we further assess if LLMs are sensitive to the same contextual effects in the application of such reforms as people are, finding broad evidence of such effects. We discuss implications for value alignment.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{emnlp2025_analyzingvaluesa,
  title = {Analyzing values about gendered language reform in LLMs’ revisions},
  author = {Jules Watson and Xi Wang and Raymond Liu and Suzanne Stevenson and Barend Beekhuizen},
  booktitle = {EMNLP 2025},
  year = {2025}
}