mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Welcome to the Modern World of Pronouns: Identity-Inclusive Natural Language Processing beyond Gender

arXiv 2202.11923 ↗First posted 24 Feb 2022cs.CLcited by 47

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Abstract (arXiv)

The world of pronouns is changing. From a closed class of words with few members to a much more open set of terms to reflect identities. However, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is barely reflecting this linguistic shift, even though recent work outlined the harms of gender-exclusive language technology. Particularly problematic is the current modeling 3rd person pronouns, as it largely ignores various phenomena like neopronouns, i.e., pronoun sets that are novel and not (yet) widely established. This omission contributes to the discrimination of marginalized and underrepresented groups, e.g., non-binary individuals. However, other identity-expression phenomena beyond gender are also ignored by current NLP technology. In this paper, we provide an overview of 3rd person pronoun issues for NLP. Based on our observations and ethical considerations, we define a series of desiderata for modeling pronouns in language technology. We evaluate existing and novel modeling approaches w.r.t. these desiderata qualitatively, and quantify the impact of a more discrimination-free approach on established benchmark data.

Key facts. Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 21 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2022.

Builds on

21 of 57 references.

References · 21

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9 more
  1. 2021Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologiescited by 128
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 10; 2023: 14; 2024: 13; 2025: 6; 2026: 4.

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  1. 2023"I'm fully who I am": Towards Centering Transgender and Non-Binary Voices to Measure Biases in Open Language Generationcited by 56
  2. 2022Perturbation Augmentation for Fairer NLPcited by 51
  3. 2023MISGENDERED: Limits of Large Language Models in Understanding Pronounscited by 43
  4. 2022Multi2WOZ: A Robust Multilingual Dataset and Conversational Pretraining for Task-Oriented Dialogcited by 30
  5. 2022GeoMLAMA: Geo-Diverse Commonsense Probing on Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Modelscited by 30
  6. 2023Stereotypes and Smut: The (Mis)representation of Non-cisgender Identities by Text-to-Image Modelscited by 26
  7. 2023Gender Neutralization for an Inclusive Machine Translation: from Theoretical Foundations to Open Challengescited by 22
  8. 2024Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLPcited by 22
  9. 2024AboutMe: Using Self-Descriptions in Webpages to Document the Effects of English Pretraining Data Filterscited by 21
  10. 2023Hi Guys or Hi Folks? Benchmarking Gender-Neutral Machine Translation with the GeNTE Corpuscited by 20
  11. 2023What about em? How Commercial Machine Translation Fails to Handle (Neo-)Pronounscited by 19
  12. 2022Fair and Argumentative Language Modeling for Computational Argumentationcited by 18
35 more
  1. 2024Robust Pronoun Fidelity with English LLMs: Are they Reasoning, Repeating, or Just Biased?cited by 17
  2. 2022How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronounscited by 16
  3. 2023Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challengescited by 16
  4. 2023Tokenization Matters: Navigating Data-Scarce Tokenization for Gender Inclusive Language Technologiescited by 16
  5. 2023Values, Ethics, Morals? On the Use of Moral Concepts in NLP Researchcited by 13
  6. 2024A Prompt Response to the Demand for Automatic Gender-Neutral Translationcited by 12
  7. 2022Can Demographic Factors Improve Text Classification? Revisiting Demographic Adaptation in the Age of Transformerscited by 10
  8. 2024WinoPron: Revisiting English Winogender Schemas for Consistency, Coverage, and Grammatical Casecited by 9
  9. 2022SocioProbe: What, When, and Where Language Models Learn about Sociodemographicscited by 7
  10. 2024Enhancing Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation with Neomorphemes and Large Language Modelscited by 7
  11. 2023Test Suites Task: Evaluation of Gender Fairness in MT with MuST-SHE and INEScited by 6
  12. 2024MisgenderMender: A Community-Informed Approach to Interventions for Misgenderingcited by 6
  13. 2025Agree to Disagree? A Meta-Evaluation of LLM Misgenderingcited by 6
  14. 2022Bridging Fairness and Environmental Sustainability in Natural Language Processingcited by 5
  15. 2023Transcending the "Male Code": Implicit Masculine Biases in NLP Contextscited by 5
  16. 2024QueerBench: Quantifying Discrimination in Language Models Toward Queer Identitiescited by 5
  17. 2024Do language models practice what they preach? Examining language ideologies about gendered language reform encoded in LLMscited by 5
  18. 2023"I'm" Lost in Translation: Pronoun Missteps in Crowdsourced Data Setscited by 4
  19. 2024Argument Quality Assessment in the Age of Instruction-Following Large Language Modelscited by 4
  20. 2022Back to the Future: On Potential Histories in NLPcited by 3
  21. 2023Comparing Humans and Models on a Similar Scale: Towards Cognitive Gender Bias Evaluation in Coreference Resolutioncited by 3
  22. 2024The Life Cycle of Large Language Models: A Review of Biases in Educationcited by 3
  23. 2024Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronounscited by 2
  24. 2024Applying Intrinsic Debiasing on Downstream Tasks: Challenges and Considerations for Machine Translationcited by 2
  25. 2025An LLM-as-a-judge Approach for Scalable Gender-Neutral Translation Evaluationcited by 2
  26. 2025Analyzing values about gendered language reform in LLMs' revisionscited by 1
  27. 2026QueerGen: How LLMs Reflect Societal Norms on Gender and Sexuality in Sentence Completion Taskscited by 1
  28. 2026Voice or Stereotype? Disentangling Acoustic and Content-Based Gender in Speech-to-Speech Modelscited by 1
  29. 2022On the Limitations of Sociodemographic Adaptation with Transformerscited by 0
  30. 2023PronounFlow: A Hybrid Approach for Calibrating Pronouns in Sentencescited by 0
  31. 2025Scaling Crowdsourced Election Monitoring: Construction and Evaluation of Classification Models for Multilingual and Cross-Domain Classification Settingscited by 0
  32. 2025A Bayesian account of pronoun and neopronoun acquisitioncited by 0
  33. 2025Gender Inclusivity Fairness Index (GIFI): A Multilevel Framework for Evaluating Gender Diversity in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  34. 2026GRUFF: LLM Pronoun Fidelity, Reasoning, and Biases in Germancited by 0
  35. 2026WinoQueer-NL: Assessing Bias in Dutch Language Models toward LGBTQ+ Identitiescited by 0