How does Grammatical Gender Affect Noun Representations in Gender-Marking Languages?

Understand

Many natural languages assign grammatical gender also to inanimate nouns in the language.

• In such languages, words that relate to the gender-marked nouns are inflected to agree with the noun's gender.
• We show that this affects the word representations of inanimate nouns, resulting in nouns with the same gender being closer to each other than nouns with different gender.
• While "embedding debiasing" methods fail to remove the effect, we demonstrate that a careful application of methods that neutralize grammatical gender signals from the words' context when training word embeddings is effective in removing it.