2023/10/18 by Giuseppe Attanasio, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Attanasio, Giuseppe +5 · 5 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Text Readability and Simplification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.12127
openalex publication_date 2023/10/18 · openalex created_date 2023/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Recent instruction fine-tuned models can solve multiple NLP tasks when prompted to do so, with machine translation (MT) being a prominent use case. However, current research often focuses on standard performance benchmarks, leaving compelling fairness and ethical considerations behind. In MT, this might lead to misgendered translations, resulting, among other harms, in the perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudices. In this work, we address this gap by investigating whether and to what extent such models exhibit gender bias in machine translation and how we can mitigate it. Concretely, we compute established gender bias metrics on the WinoMT corpus from English to German and Spanish. We discover that IFT models default to male-inflected translations, even disregarding female occupational stereotypes. Next, using interpretability methods, we unveil that models systematically overlook the pronoun indicating the gender of a target occupation in misgendered translations. Finally, based on this finding, we propose an easy-to-implement and effective bias mitigation solution based on few-shot learning that leads to significantly fairer translations.