Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Jan 2021)

Gender Bias in Machine Translation

  • Beatrice Savoldi,
  • Marco Gaido,
  • Luisa Bentivogli,
  • Matteo Negri,
  • Marco Turchi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00401
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9
pp. 845 – 874

Abstract

Read online

AbstractMachine translation (MT) technology has facilitated our daily tasks by providing accessible shortcuts for gathering, processing, and communicating information. However, it can suffer from biases that harm users and society at large. As a relatively new field of inquiry, studies of gender bias in MT still lack cohesion. This advocates for a unified framework to ease future research. To this end, we: i) critically review current conceptualizations of bias in light of theoretical insights from related disciplines, ii) summarize previous analyses aimed at assessing gender bias in MT, iii) discuss the mitigating strategies proposed so far, and iv) point toward potential directions for future work.