# User-Centric Gender Rewriting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.02211 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02211/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08976/) (2019)
- [Lipstick on a Pig: Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03862/) (2019)
- [Identifying and Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03035/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Neural Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11714/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Languages with Rich Morphology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04571/) (2019)
- [Learning Gender-Neutral Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01496/) (2018)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03842/) (2019)
- [Black is to Criminal as Caucasian is to Police: Detecting and Removing Multiclass Bias in Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04047/) (2019)
- [The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06678/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06001/) (2021)
- [It's All in the Name: Mitigating Gender Bias with Name-Based Counterfactual Data Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00871/) (2019)
- [Getting Gender Right in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05088/) (2019)
- [Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10486/) (2019)
- [Synthetic Data Generation for Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13318/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Multilingual Embeddings and Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00699/) (2020)
- [Personalized Machine Translation: Preserving Original Author Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05461/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [GPTAraEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Arabic NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14976/) (2023)
- [Dolphin: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Arabic NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14989/) (2023)
- [Hi Guys or Hi Folks? Benchmarking Gender-Neutral Machine Translation with the GeNTE Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05294/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Biased Models to De-bias Text: A Gender-Fair Rewriting Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11140/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty Quantification for Evaluating Machine Translation Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18338/) (2025)
- [The User-Aware Arabic Gender Rewriter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07538/) (2022)
- [The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12410/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we define the task of gender rewriting in contexts involving two users (I and/or You) - first and second grammatical persons with independent grammatical gender preferences. We focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. We develop a multi-step system that combines the positive aspects of both rule-based and neural rewriting models. Our results successfully demonstrate the viability of this approach on a recently created corpus for Arabic gender rewriting, achieving 88.42 M2 F0.5 on a blind test set. Our proposed system improves over previous work on the first-person-only version of this task, by 3.05 absolute increase in M2 F0.5. We demonstrate a use case of our gender rewriting system by using it to post-edit the output of a commercial MT system to provide personalized outputs based on the users' grammatical gender preferences. We make our code, data, and models publicly available.