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Evaluation of Gender Bias in Amharic Word Embedding Model

Zenebe, Beimnet orcid logoORCID: 0009-0004-3952-7851, Gizaw, Solomon and Abgaz, Yalemisew orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-3887-5342 (2024) Evaluation of Gender Bias in Amharic Word Embedding Model. In: The 29th International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems, 25-27 June 2024, Turin, Italy.

Bias in natural language processing systems can perpetuate and exacerbate societal inequalities, reflecting and potentially amplifying existing biases in human language and culture. Amharic, as the official language of Ethiopia, holds cultural and linguistic significance, making it imperative to assess potential biases within its computational representations. This research paper investigates the presence and extent of gender bias in Amharic text corpora. The research utilizes gendered word pairs to capture gender representation in the word embeddings and quantifies the degrees of gender bias present in profession words. We found that profession words carried stereotypical implicit biases with most occupations leaning towards male. Profession words like "nurse" and "house-maid" align with societal gender dynamics, displaying significant female associations. Additionally, professions in the arts and athleticism demonstrate a robust female-leaning bias, while physically demanding and educated professional roles tend to exhibit male-leaning biases. The study contributes insights into the gender dynamics encoded within the Amharic language informing strategies to reduce bias and fostering fair and unbiased representations for improved societal and technological outcomes.
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Gender Bias, Natural Language Processing, Word Embeddings, Bias Measurement, Amharic Corpus
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Computational linguistics
Computer Science > Machine learning
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Published in: Natural Language Processing and Information Systems: 29th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2024, Turin, Italy, June 25–27, 2024, Proceedings. (2). Springer-Verlag.
Publisher:Springer-Verlag
Official URL:https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-70242-6_1...
Copyright Information:Authors
ID Code:30039
Deposited On:18 Feb 2025 14:46 by Yalemisew Abgaz . Last Modified 18 Feb 2025 14:46

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