Gender-fair transformer-based rewriter for English-to-Greek machine translation

Start - End 
2025 - 2029 (ongoing)
Type 
Department(s) 
Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication
Research Focus 
Research Language 
Additional tags 
computational linguistics

Tabgroup

Abstract

As the use of machine translation (MT) continues to grow, along with the increasing societal demand for inclusivity, research on gender bias in MT is expanding. Gender bias becomes particularly pronounced when translating from a notional gender language, like English, where gender is not always defined, into a grammatical gender language, like Greek, where gender is deeply morphologically embedded. This research proposal focuses on gender fairness in MT for English-to-Greek translations, a highly understudied language pair, and will explore the task of rewriting as a gender bias mitigation strategy. The goal is to develop a human-centered, transformer-based gender-aware rewriter that detects gender ambiguity in the English text and, if present, generates gender-explicit and gender-fair (i.e. gender-inclusive and gender-neutral) Greek translation variants. Designed as a plug-in for integration into existing translation systems (e.g. Google Translate, DeepL), the rewriter will inform users about the presence of gender ambiguity and allow them to select their preferred output in gender-ambiguous cases. The development of gender-fair strategies will be informed by an in-depth investigation of current Greek linguistic practices, resulting in a set of guidelines that go beyond the gender binary in existing (official) guides.

People

Supervisor(s)

Phd Student(s)

External(s)

Luna De Bruyne

University of Antwerp