How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns

Stephanie Brandl; Ruixiang Cui; Anders Søgaard

NAACL 2022long29 citations

How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns

Stephanie Brandl, Ruixiang Cui, Anders Søgaard

Abstract

Gender-neutral pronouns have recently been introduced in many languages to a) include non-binary people and b) as a generic singular. Recent results from psycholinguistics suggest that gender-neutral pronouns (in Swedish) are not associated with human processing difficulties. This, we show, is in sharp contrast with automated processing. We show that gender-neutral pronouns in Danish, English, and Swedish are associated with higher perplexity, more dispersed attention patterns, and worse downstream performance. We argue that such conservativity in language models may limit widespread adoption of gender-neutral pronouns and must therefore be resolved.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{brandl-etal-2022-conservative,
    title = "How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns",
    author = "Brandl, Stephanie  and
      Cui, Ruixiang  and
      S{\o}gaard, Anders",
    editor = "Carpuat, Marine  and
      de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine  and
      Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jul,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Seattle, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.265/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.265",
    pages = "3624--3630"
}