Question: Who is the root of gender and language study?
Evidence: The study of gender and language has a rich history in social science. Its roots are often attributed to Robin Lakoff, who argued that language is fundamental to gender inequality, “reflected in both the ways women are expected to speak, and the ways in which women are spoken of” BIBREF2. Prominent scholars following Lakoff have included Deborah Tannen BIBREF3, Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall BIBREF4, Janet Holmes BIBREF5, Penelope Eckert BIBREF6, and Deborah Cameron BIBREF7, along with many others.
In recent decades, the study of gender and language has also attracted computational researchers. Echoing Lakoff's original claim, a popular strand of computational work focuses on differences in how women and men talk, analyzing key lexical traits BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10 and predicting a person's gender from some text they have written BIBREF11, BIBREF12. There is also research studying how people talk to women and men BIBREF13, as well as how people talk about women and men, typically in specific domains such as sports journalism BIBREF14, fiction writing BIBREF15, movie scripts BIBREF16, and Wikipedia biographies BIBREF17, BIBREF18. Our work builds on this body by diving into two novel domains: celebrity news, which explores gender in pop culture, and student reviews of CS professors, which examines gender in academia and, particularly, the historically male-dominated field of CS. Furthermore, many of these works rely on manually constructed lexicons or topics to pinpoint gendered language, but our methods automatically infer gender-associated words and labeled clusters, thus reducing supervision and increasing the potential to discover subtleties in the data.
Modeling gender associations in language could also be instrumental to other NLP tasks. Abusive language is often founded in sexism BIBREF0, BIBREF1, so models of gender associations could help to improve detection in those cases. Gender bias also manifests in NLP pipelines: prior research has found that word embeddings preserve gender biases BIBREF19, BIBREF20, BIBREF21, and some have developed methods to reduce this bias BIBREF22, BIBREF23. Yet, the problem is far from solved; for example, BIBREF24 showed that it is still possible to recover gender bias from “de-biased” embeddings. These findings further motivate our research, since before we can fully reduce gender bias in embeddings, we need to develop a deeper understanding of how gender permeates through language in the first place.
We also build on methods to cluster words in word embedding space and automatically label clusters. Clustering word embeddings has proven useful for discovering salient patterns in text corpora BIBREF25, BIBREF26. Once clusters are derived, we would like them to be interpretable. Much research simply considers the top-n words from each cluster, but this method can be subjective and time-consuming to interpret. Thus, there are efforts to design methods of automatic cluster labeling BIBREF27. We take a similar approach to BIBREF28, who leverage word embeddings and WordNet during labeling, and we extend their method with additional techniques and evaluations.
The study of gender and language has a rich history in social science. Its roots are often attributed to Robin Lakoff, who argued that language is fundamental to gender inequality, “reflected in both the ways women are expected to speak, and the ways in which women are spoken of” (Lakoff, 1973).
Answer: Robin Lakoff, who argued that language is fundamental to gender inequality, “reflected in both the ways women are expected to speak, and the ways in which women are spoken of”.