# Gender Lost In Translation: How Bridging The Gap Between Languages Affects Gender Bias in Zero-Shot Multilingual Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16935/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06001/) (2021)
- [Getting Gender Right in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05088/) (2019)
- [Reducing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation as a Domain Adaptation Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04498/) (2020)
- [The Missing Ingredient in Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07091/) (2019)
- [Gender in Danger? Evaluating Speech Translation Technology on the MuST-SHE Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05754/) (2020)
- [Improving Zero-Shot Translation by Disentangling Positional Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15127/) (2020)
- [Improving Zero-shot Translation with Language-Independent Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08584/) (2019)
- [Filling Gender & Number Gaps in Neural Machine Translation with Black-box Context Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03467/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00545/) (2024)
- [Gender Inflected or Bias Inflicted: On Using Grammatical Gender Cues for Bias Evaluation in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03767/) (2023)
- [Current State-of-the-Art of Bias Detection and Mitigation in Machine Translation for African and European Languages: a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21126/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural machine translation (NMT) models often suffer from gender biases that harm users and society at large. In this work, we explore how bridging the gap between languages for which parallel data is not available affects gender bias in multilingual NMT, specifically for zero-shot directions. We evaluate translation between grammatical gender languages which requires preserving the inherent gender information from the source in the target language. We study the effect of encouraging language-agnostic hidden representations on models' ability to preserve gender and compare pivot-based and zero-shot translation regarding the influence of the bridge language (participating in all language pairs during training) on gender preservation. We find that language-agnostic representations mitigate zero-shot models' masculine bias, and with increased levels of gender inflection in the bridge language, pivoting surpasses zero-shot translation regarding fairer gender preservation for speaker-related gender agreement.