On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs
Published
2022-01-04
Adina Williams
,
Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin
,
Damian Blasi
,
Hanna Wallach
,
Ryan D Cotterell
Adina Williams
FAIR
Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin
Google
Damian Blasi
University of Zurich
Hanna Wallach
Microsoft Research
Ryan D Cotterell
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe those nouns. For all six languages, we find that there is a statistically significant relationship. We also find that there are statistically significant relationships between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the verbs that take those nouns as direct objects, as indirect objects, and as subjects. We defer a deeper investigation of these relationships for future work.
Article at MIT Press
Presented at EMNLP 2021