Quantifying the Semantic Core of Gender Systems

By Adina Williams, Ryan Cotterell, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Damián E. Blasi, Hanna M. Wallach. 2019

19 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many of the world’s languages employ grammatical gender on the lexeme. For instance, in Spanish, house “casa” is feminine, whereas the word for paper “papel” is masculine. To a speaker of a genderless language, this categorization seems to exist with neither rhyme nor reason. But, is the association of nouns to gender classes truly arbitrary? In this work, we present the first large-scale investigation of the arbitrariness of gender assignment that uses canonical correlation analysis as a method for correlating the gender of inanimate nouns with their lexical semantic meaning. We find that the gender systems of 18 languages exhibit a significant correlation with an externally grounded definition of lexical semantics.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, General Social Sciences, Natural Language Processing

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Citations in the corpus

Queens Are Powerful Too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation (2019, background): “This word embedding work has extended to multilingual work on gender-marking (Gonen et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2019; Zhou et al., 2019).”