Is there Gender Bias in Dependency Parsing? Revisiting “Women’s Syntactic Resilience”
Paul Patrick V. Go, Agnieszka Faleńska · 2024
In this paper, we revisit the seminal work of Garimella et al. (2019), who reported that dependency parsers learn demographicallyrelated signals from their training data and perform differently on sentences authored by people of different genders.We re-run all the parsing experiments from Garimella et al. (2019) and find that their results are not reproducible.Additionally, the original patterns suggesting the presence of gender biases fail to generalize to other treebanks and parsing architectures.Instead, our data analysis uncovers methodological shortcomings in the initial study that artificially introduced differences into female and male datasets during preprocessing.These disparities potentially compromised the validity of the original conclusions.