# A Tale of Pronouns: Interpretability Informs Gender Bias Mitigation for Fairer Instruction-Tuned Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12127 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12127/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09700/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00453/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08976/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00591/) (2019)
- [Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00344/) (2018)
- [Explaining Black Box Predictions and Unveiling Data Artifacts through Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06676/) (2020)
- [Assessing Gender Bias in Machine Translation -- A Case Study with Google Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02208/) (2018)
- [Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06001/) (2021)
- [Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation Learns Anaphora Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10163/) (2018)
- [Reducing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation as a Domain Adaptation Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04498/) (2020)
- [Inseq: An Interpretability Toolkit for Sequence Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13942/) (2023)
- [Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Machine Translation: Model Internal Workings Alone Do Well, Sentence Similarity Even Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08597/) (2022)
- [Equalizing Gender Biases in Neural Machine Translation with Word Embeddings Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03116/) (2019)
- [Collecting a Large-Scale Gender Bias Dataset for Coreference Resolution and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03858/) (2021)
- [On Measuring Gender Bias in Translation of Gender-neutral Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11684/) (2019)
- [Gender in Danger? Evaluating Speech Translation Technology on the MuST-SHE Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05754/) (2020)
- [Unbabel's Participation in the WMT20 Metrics Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15535/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Gender Bias in Large Language Models across Multiple Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00277/) (2024)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- [On Behalf of the Stakeholders: Trends in NLP Model Interpretability in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19200/) (2024)
- [LLMCheckup: Conversational Examination of Large Language Models via Interpretability Tools and Self-Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12576/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18454/) (2024)
- [Watching the Watchers: Exposing Gender Disparities in Machine Translation Quality Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10995/) (2024)
- [The Lou Dataset -- Exploring the Impact of Gender-Fair Language in German Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17929/) (2024)
- [Voice, Bias, and Coreference: An Interpretability Study of Gender in Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21517/) (2025)
- [Isolating Culture Neurons in Multilingual Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02241/) (2025)
- [Blind Men and the Elephant: Diverse Perspectives on Gender Stereotypes in Benchmark Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01168/) (2025)
- [What Triggers my Model? Contrastive Explanations Inform Gender Choices by Translation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08440/) (2025)
- [Neuron-Level Interventions for Gendered and Gender-Neutral Generation in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30717/) (2026)
- [SoK: Towards Security and Safety of Edge AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05349/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Towards Ethical Multi-Agent Systems of Large Language Models: A Mechanistic Interpretability Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04691/) (2025)
- [Fine-grained Gender Control in Machine Translation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15154/) (2024)
- [Cultural Fidelity in English-to-Hindi Translation: A Preservation-Fluency Frontier for Gender Recoverability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27654/) (2026)
- [Explaining GAND: A Resource on Gender-Ambiguous Natural Data & Contrastive Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22546/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent instruction fine-tuned models can solve multiple NLP tasks when prompted to do so, with machine translation (MT) being a prominent use case. However, current research often focuses on standard performance benchmarks, leaving compelling fairness and ethical considerations behind. In MT, this might lead to misgendered translations, resulting, among other harms, in the perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudices. In this work, we address this gap by investigating whether and to what extent such models exhibit gender bias in machine translation and how we can mitigate it. Concretely, we compute established gender bias metrics on the WinoMT corpus from English to German and Spanish. We discover that IFT models default to male-inflected translations, even disregarding female occupational stereotypes. Next, using interpretability methods, we unveil that models systematically overlook the pronoun indicating the gender of a target occupation in misgendered translations. Finally, based on this finding, we propose an easy-to-implement and effective bias mitigation solution based on few-shot learning that leads to significantly fairer translations.