# A Bayesian account of pronoun and neopronoun acquisition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02973/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12084/) (2021)
- ["I'm fully who I am": Towards Centering Transgender and Non-Binary Voices to Measure Biases in Open Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09941/) (2023)
- [VisoGender: A dataset for benchmarking gender bias in image-text pronoun resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12424/) (2023)
- [Welcome to the Modern World of Pronouns: Identity-Inclusive Natural Language Processing beyond Gender](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11923/) (2022)
- [ChatGPT Perpetuates Gender Bias in Machine Translation and Ignores Non-Gendered Pronouns: Findings across Bengali and Five other Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10510/) (2023)
- [Stereotypes and Smut: The (Mis)representation of Non-cisgender Identities by Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17072/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation with Neomorphemes and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08477/) (2024)
- [Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00134/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A major challenge to equity among members of queer communities is the use of one's chosen forms of reference, such as personal names or pronouns. Speakers often dismiss their misuses of pronouns as "unintentional", and claim that their errors reflect many decades of fossilized mainstream language use, as well as attitudes or expectations about the relationship between one's appearance and acceptable forms of reference. We argue for explicitly modeling individual differences in pronoun selection and present a probabilistic graphical modeling approach based on the nested Chinese Restaurant Franchise Process (nCRFP) (Ahmed et al., 2013) to account for flexible pronominal reference such as chosen names and neopronouns while moving beyond form-to-meaning mappings and without lexical co-occurrence statistics to learn referring expressions, as in contemporary language models. We show that such a model can account for variability in how quickly pronouns or names are integrated into symbolic knowledge and can empower computational systems to be both flexible and respectful of queer people with diverse gender expression.