Responsibility Perspective Transfer for Italian Femicide News
Gosse Minnema, Huiyuan Lai, Benedetta Muscato, Malvina Nissim · 2023
Different ways of linguistically expressing the same real-world event can lead to different perceptions of what happened.Previous work has shown that different descriptions of genderbased violence (GBV) influence the reader's perception of who is to blame for the violence, possibly reinforcing stereotypes which see the victim as partly responsible, too.As a contribution to raise awareness on perspectivebased writing, and to facilitate access to alternative perspectives, we introduce the novel task of automatically rewriting GBV descriptions as a means to alter the perceived level of responsibility on the perpetrator.We present a quasi-parallel dataset of sentences with low and high perceived responsibility levels for the perpetrator, and experiment with unsupervised (mBART-based), zero-shot and few-shot (GPT3-based) methods for rewriting sentences.We evaluate our models using a questionnaire study and a suite of automatic metrics.