Papers › Bleaching Text: Abstract Features for Cross-lingual Gender Prediction

Bleaching Text: Abstract Features for Cross-lingual Gender Prediction

8 May 2018ACL 2018 7arXiv:1805.03122archive 2025-07-28

Rob van der Goot, Nikola Ljubešić, Ian Matroos, Malvina Nissim, Barbara Plank

Gender prediction has typically focused on lexical and social network features, yielding good performance, but making systems highly language-, topic-, and platform-dependent. Cross-lingual embeddings circumvent some of these limitations, but capture gender-specific style less. We propose an alternative: bleaching text, i.e., transforming lexical strings into more abstract features. This study provides evidence that such features allow for better transfer across languages. Moreover, we present a first study on the ability of humans to perform cross-lingual gender prediction. We find that human predictive power proves similar to that of our bleached models, and both perform better than lexical models.

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