Simon ElveryYour regular reminder that #MachineLearning models (or #AI, if you insist on ignoring the meaning of 'intelligence') will repeat and reinforce any #bias that already exists in society.
Can you find any other biases like this in #GoogleTranslate?
Thomas Fuglseth@simon I saw an example where the finnish "hän" (a gender neutral pronoun) was being translated as either "he" or "she". E.g. if "hän" was a doctor it'd be translated as "he", nurse would become "she".
(AFAIK finnish doesn't actually have gendered pronouns, I remember an interview with a Norwegian translator who'd worked on several finnish books. They'd even contact the author for clarification only to get a "well, I never really thought of a gender for that minor character" back.)
JyrkiKuoppala@Uglesett @simon In spoken Finnish, it could be argued the most commonly used personal pronoun is - in addition to being gender neutral - species neutral and also neutral with respect to (in)animateness: "se", translates to "it". Although for species neutrality there are exceptions for pets: "hän" is used often for pets although the same person may use "se" (it) for humans.
Gender neutral "hän" is the normal for written language though. And true, there are no gendered pronouns.