# Quantifying the Semantic Core of Gender Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Hidden State Variability of Pretrained Language Models Can Guide Computation Reduction for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10041/) (2022)
- [The Causal Influence of Grammatical Gender on Distributional Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18567/) (2023)
- [Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02948/) (2024)
- [Computational Morphology with Neural Network Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09404/) (2021)
- [Analyzing Finnish Inflectional Classes through Discriminative Lexicon and Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04813/) (2025)
- [Lost in Translation? Exploring the Shift in Grammatical Gender from Latin to Occitan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09156/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many of the world's languages employ grammatical gender on the lexeme. For example, in Spanish, the word for 'house' (casa) is feminine, whereas the word for 'paper' (papel) is masculine. To a speaker of a genderless language, this assignment seems to exist with neither rhyme nor reason. But is the assignment of inanimate nouns to grammatical genders truly arbitrary? We present the first large-scale investigation of the arbitrariness of noun-gender assignments. To that end, we use canonical correlation analysis to correlate the grammatical gender of inanimate nouns with an externally grounded definition of their lexical semantics. We find that 18 languages exhibit a significant correlation between grammatical gender and lexical semantics.