Man is to Person as Woman is to Location: Measuring Gender Bias in Named Entity Recognition

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We study the bias in several state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) models---specifically, a difference in the ability to recognize male and female names as PERSON entity types.

• We evaluate NER models on a dataset containing 139 years of U.S.
• census baby names and find that relatively more female names, as opposed to male names, are not recognized as PERSON entities.
• We study the extent of this bias in several NER systems that are used prominently in industry and academia.