Controlling Gender Equality with Shallow NLP Techniques

Controlling Gender Equality with Shallow NLP Techniques M. Carl, S. Garnier, J. Haller Institut f¨ur Angewandte Informationsforschung 66111 Saarbr¨ucken Germany {carl,sandrine,hans}@iai.uni-sb.de A. Altmayer and B. Miemietz Universit¨at des Saarlandes 66123 Saarbr¨ucken, Germany anne@altmayer.info Miemietz.Baerbel@MH-Hannover.DE Abstract This paper introduces the “Gendercheck Editor”, a tool to check German texts for gender discriminatory formulations. It re- lays on shallow rule-based techniques as used in the Controlled Language Author- ing Technology (CLAT). The paper outlines major sources of gender imbalances in Ger- man texts. It gives a background on the underlying CLAT technology and describes the marking and annotation strategy to au- tomatically detect and visualize the ques- tionable pieces of text. The paper provides a detailed evaluation of the editor. 1 Introduction Times of feminist (language) revolution are gone, but marks are left behind in the form of a changed society with a changed conscious- ness and changed gender roles. Nevertheless language use seems to oppose changes much stronger than society does. As the use of non- discriminatory language is nowadays compul- sory in administration and official documents, a number of guidelines and recommendations ex- ist, which help to avoid gender imbalance and stereotypes in language use. Although in some cases men may be concerned (as for example most terms referring to criminals are mascu- line nouns) the main concern is about adequate representation of women in language, especially in a professional context. Psychological tests demonstrate that persons reading or hearing masculine job titles (so-called generic terms al- legedly meaning both women and men) do not visualize women working in this field. In order to avoid this kind of discrimination two main principles are often suggested (e.g. as in (Ges, 1999; Uni, 2000)): 1. use of gender-neutral language, which rather ”disguises” the acting person by us- ing impersonal phrases. 2. explicit naming of women and men as equally represented acting persons. Using and applying these guidelines in a faith- ful manner is time-consuming and requires a great amount of practice, which can not al- ways be provided, particularly by unexperi- enced writer. Moreover these guidelines are of- ten completely unknown in non-feminist circles. A tool which checks texts for discriminatory use of language is thus mandatory to promote writ- ten gender equality, educate and remind writer of unacceptable forms to avoid. In this paper we describe the project “Gen- dercheck” which uses a controlled-language au- thoring tool (CLAT) as a platform and editor to check German texts for discriminatory lan- guage. In section 2 we introduce three categories of gender discrimination in German texts and pro- vide possibilities for their reformulation. Section 3 introduces the technology on which the Gendercheck editor is based. The linguis- tic engine proceeds in two steps, a marking and filtering phase where gender discriminatory for- mulations are automatically detected. A graph- ical interface plots the detected formulations and prompts the according messages for correc- tion . Section 4 then goes into the detail of the marking and filtering technique. We use the shallow pattern formalism kurd (Carl and …

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