Grammatical Gender

Grammatical gender, the assignment of masculine, feminine, or neuter categories to nouns, is a linguistic feature influencing how language models process and generate text, revealing biases and impacting downstream applications. Current research uses large language models (LLMs), such as BERT and transformer architectures, to investigate how grammatical gender interacts with semantic meaning, political values, and social biases in various languages, often employing novel methods to disentangle grammatical gender from other factors. These studies highlight the importance of accounting for grammatical gender in bias evaluation and mitigation for machine translation and other NLP tasks, improving fairness and accuracy in these systems.