Gender Neutralization for an Inclusive Machine Translation: from Theoretical Foundations to Open Challenges (2023)

Abstract: Gender inclusivity in language technologies has become a prominent research topic. In this study, we explore gender-neutral translation (GNT) as a form of gender inclusivity and a goal to be achieved by machine translation (MT) models, which have been found to perpetuate gender bias and discrimination. Specifically, we focus on translation from English into Italian, a language pair representative of salient gender-related linguistic transfer problems. To define GNT, we review a selection of relevant institutional guidelines for gender-inclusive language, discuss its scenarios of use, and examine the technical challenges of performing GNT in MT, concluding with a discussion of potential solutions to encourage advancements toward greater inclusivity in MT.

## introduction language technologies have become ubiquitous and play a significant role in our lives. in addition to their benefits, however, these technologies come with potential ethical shortcomings and risks @xcite . among them is gender bias, whose presence in machine translation (mt) is well-documented @xcite . indeed, mt systems were found to systematically prefer masculine forms (e.g., en the @xmath0.g., en the doctors and the @xmath1, thus reinforcing bias and reiterating the under-representation of specific groups @xcite . as the role of gender is relevant on the social level @xcite and for each individual's construction of identity @xcite , the biased behaviors of mt systems give rise to concerns about the consequent risks. these risks rest on the power of language to reproduce and reinforce societal asymmetries @xcite , and its impact on our perception @xcite . spurred by the ever-growing demand for a gender-inclusive language, in this work we explore gender-neutral language as a form of gender inclusivity. it conforms to standard and established linguistic resources that allow to avoid gendered forms (e.g., chairperson instead of chairman)unlike innovative elements like neopronouns and neomorphemes, which are not considered acceptable in many contexts (see section 2.1). comprehensive inquiries on gender-neutral mt are largely absent and its implementation is a substantially uncharted territory. such gap calls for dedicated work on methodological underpinnings, such as the definition of the objectives and an outline of the main challenges to be faced when developing gender-neutral mt systems. in light of the foregoing, in the present work we discuss the implementation of inclusive language in mt, through the definition of a novel task for mt: gender-neutral translation (gnt). for this purpose, we first provide a brief account of the relation between gender and language, and gender bias in mt (section 2). then, we focus on english-italian translation and start by analysing relevant guidelines for gender inclusivity in both languages to understand the current theoretical frameworks (section 3). we chose this language pair because it is representative of the challenges faced by mt systems when translating across languages that express gender differently. this mismatch can result in undesired and discriminatory phenomena, such as the misgendering of individuals or stereotyped translations. thereafter, we integrate the main principles of the guidelines into the context of mt, thus outlining a set of desiderata which define the task of gnt in higher detail (section 4). finally, we discuss the open technical challenges that performing and evaluating gnt in mt entails, and examine the potential approaches to address them, thus sketching a road-map towards the implementation of gnt in mt (section 5). ## background gender is a complex notion, which has been extensively debated across several disciplines. in the case of language, the relationship with gender is socially relevant (section 2.1), with an impact on both the visibility of gender groups @xcite and the construction of personal identities @xcite . therefore, the appropriate use of gender expressions is critical in communicative practices, including those allowed by language technologies (section 2.2). ## framing gender-inclusive language looking for guidance to determine how mt systems should adopt gender-inclusive language, the mt scenario remains largely unexplored. nonetheless, several resources intended for (human) communication are available and offer valuable linguistic knowledge for the understanding of gender-inclusive language and towards its adoption in mt. among the most influential and accessible resources, there are the guidelines produced by renowned institutions to address gender discrimination in language. we consider them 'topdown' approaches in language, as opposed to the 'bottom-up' efforts of grassroots movements. institutional guidelines currently only address monolingual communication while our domain of interest is translation. however, we analyze them to collect useful inclusive linguistic strategies, which let us investigate gnt and discuss its practical implications. more precisely, we intend to i) explore how gender inclusivity is conceptualized within such guidelines (section 3.1), and ii) gain insights concerning what should be neutralized and how it should be neutralized (section 3.2). to this aim, we selected 30 guidelines published online foot_3 by relevant institutions, equally divided between guidelines for english and italian (see the full list of guidelines in appendix a.1). besides prestige, we prioritized comparability: we selected guidelines by international institutions (e.g., the european union) that published the same document in both languages, or by national institutions (e.g., universities and governmental bodies) that share a similar status across countries, thus also ensuring that the selected guidelines belong to the same textual genre. ## desiderata for gnt in mt in light of both the insights that emerged in section 3, we now specifically address the use case of gnt, which allows mt systems to avoid discriminatory practices while conforming to standard linguistic forms. specifically, we define gnt as the task of automatically translating from one language into another without marking the gender of human referents in the target. for example, given the english sentence your neighbors will thank you, an inclusive mt system is required to translate il vostro vicinato foot_4 vi ringrazierà, as opposed to i vostri vicini vi ringrazieranno, which features a masculine generic. one crucial aspect of gnt is to determine when it should be performed, namely, when the marking of gender should be avoided or preferred. to this aim, and informed by our analysis of the existing guidelines, we devise three main desiderata to obtain a gender-neutral mt output, with specific examples in ## challenges and insights for a gender-neutral machine translation the adoption of neutral forms in mt could be conceived as a condition to be met or not met, without any intermediate nuance. the efficacy with which the condition is satisfied, on the contrary, can be rather nuanced; for example, there might be alternative inclusive solutions which might be perceived as more elegant or semantically closer to the input text, and others that satisfy these conditions to a lesser extent. therefore, from a formal perspective, gender inclusivity can be likened to the concept of constraint @xcite . as a constraint, it shows a multifaceted character, which makes it comparable to other types of well-known constraints adopted in automatic language generation @xcite . first, as seen in section 3, gender inclusivity can be linguistically realized through both specific lexical forms and syntactic constructions. for this rea-son, it can be likened to lexical and syntactic constraints. then, the requirement of producing automatic translations that are as readable and fluent as possible, which is not always easily guaranteed in the case of neutral reformulations, makes gender inclusivity analogous to utility constraints (i.e. the criteria by which a text must exhibit characteristics such as coherence, comprehensibility, and faithfulness) @xcite . nevertheless, gender inclusivity also summarizes the manifold challenges of the aforementioned constraints, thereby demonstrating a higher level of complexity. below we illustrate the major challenges of satisfying such a multifaceted constraint, focusing on the dynamicity of the neutralization strategies (section 5.1), the dearth of adequate training data and methods (section 5.2), and the lack of evaluation procedures (section 5.3).