The Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus 2.0: Extensions and Analyses

TL;DR

This paper introduces an expanded Arabic gender corpus with over 590K words, enabling improved gender bias mitigation in NLP, especially for morphologically rich languages, through datasets supporting gender identification and rewriting.

Contribution

The paper presents APGC v2.0, an extended, publicly available corpus for Arabic gender analysis, including second person targets and increased data, advancing research in gender bias mitigation.

Findings

Expanded corpus with 6.5 times more sentences

Includes second person gender targets

Supports gender identification and rewriting tasks

Abstract

Gender bias in natural language processing (NLP) applications, particularly machine translation, has been receiving increasing attention. Much of the research on this issue has focused on mitigating gender bias in English NLP models and systems. Addressing the problem in poorly resourced, and/or morphologically rich languages has lagged behind, largely due to the lack of datasets and resources. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus for gender identification and rewriting in contexts involving one or two target users (I and/or You) -- first and second grammatical persons with independent grammatical gender preferences. We focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. The corpus has multiple parallel components: four combinations of 1st and 2nd person in feminine and masculine grammatical genders, as well as English, and English to Arabic machine translation output. This corpus expands on Habash et al. (2019)'s Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus (APGC v1.0) by adding second person targets as well as increasing the total number of sentences over 6.5 times, reaching over 590K words. Our new dataset will aid the research and development of gender identification, controlled text generation, and post-editing rewrite systems that could be used to personalize NLP applications and provide users with the correct outputs based on their grammatical gender preferences. We make the Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus (APGC v2.0) publicly available.