# The Causal Influence of Grammatical Gender on Distributional Semantics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18567 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18567/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2023.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [SimLex-999: Evaluating Semantic Models with (Genuine) Similarity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.3456/) (2014)
- [Multi-SimLex: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Lexical Semantic Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04866/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04760/) (2019)
- [Estimating the Entropy of Linguistic Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01469/) (2022)
- [On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01204/) (2020)
- [Quantifying the Semantic Core of Gender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13497/) (2019)
- [Measuring Gender Bias in Word Embeddings of Gendered Languages Requires Disentangling Grammatical Gender Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01691/) (2022)
- [Grammatical Gender, Neo-Whorfianism, and Word Embeddings: A Data-Driven Approach to Linguistic Relativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09729/) (2019)

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

- [What Can String Probability Tell Us About Grammaticality?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16227/) (2025)
- [Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02948/) (2024)
- [Estimating Grammatical Gender Directions in Contextual Embeddings under Controlled and Natural Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30152/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past results, we find a significant relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives that modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, the relationship between grammatical gender and adjective choice is near zero and insignificant.