Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female politicians. In this paper, we aim not to merely study this phenomenon qualitatively, but instead to quantify the degree to which the language used to describe men and women is different and, moreover, different in a positive or negative way. To that end, we introduce a generative latent-variable model that jointly represents adjective (or verb) choice, with its sentiment, given the natural gender of a head (or dependent) noun. We find that there are significant differences between descriptions of male and female nouns and that these differences align with common gender stereotypes: Positive adjectives used to describe women are more often related to their bodies than adjectives used to describe men.

The SIGMORPHON 2019 shared task on cross-lingual transfer and contextual analysis in morphology examined transfer learning of inflection between 100 language pairs, as well as contextual lemmatization and morphosyntactic description in 66 languages. The first task evolves past years' inflection tasks by examining transfer of morphological inflection knowledge from a high-resource language to a low-resource language. This year also presents a new second challenge on lemmatization and morphological feature analysis in context. All submissions featured a neural component and built on either this year's strong baselines or highly ranked systems from previous years' shared tasks. Every participating team improved in accuracy over the baselines for the inflection task (though not Levenshtein distance), and every team in the contextual analysis task improved on both state-of-the-art neural and non-neural baselines. Data Data for Task 1Language pairs We presented data in 100 language pairs spanning 79 unique languages. Data for all but four languages (Basque, Kurmanji, Murrinhpatha, and Sorani) are extracted from English Wiktionary, a large multi-lingual crowdsourced dictionary with morphological paradigms

Many of the world's languages employ grammatical gender on the lexeme. For example, in Spanish, the word for house (casa) is feminine, whereas the word for paper (papel) is masculine. To a speaker of a genderless language, this assignment seems to exist with neither rhyme nor reason. But is the assignment of inanimate nouns to grammatical genders truly arbitrary? We present the first large-scale investigation of the arbitrariness of noun-gender assignments. To that end, we use canonical correlation analysis to correlate the grammatical gender of inanimate nouns with an externally grounded definition of their lexical semantics. We find that 18 languages exhibit a significant correlation between grammatical gender and lexical semantics.

When assigning quantitative labels to a dataset, different methodologies may rely on different scales. In particular, when assigning polarities to words in a sentiment lexicon, annotators may use binary, categorical, or continuous labels. Naturally, it is of interest to unify these labels from disparate scales to both achieve maximal coverage over words and to create a single, more robust sentiment lexicon while retaining scale coherence. We introduce a generative model of sentiment lexica to combine disparate scales into a common latent representation. We realize this model with a novel multi-view variational autoencoder (VAE), called SentiVAE. We evaluate our approach via a downstream text classification task involving nine English-Language sentiment analysis datasets; our representation outperforms six individual sentiment lexica, as well as a straightforward combination thereof.

Statistical morphological inflectors are typically trained on fully supervised, type-level data. One remaining open research question is the following: How can we effectively exploit raw, token-level data to improve their performance? To this end, we introduce a novel generative latent-variable model for the semi-supervised learning of inflection generation. To enable posterior inference over the latent variables, we derive an efficient variational inference procedure based on the wake-sleep algorithm. We experiment on 23 languages, using the Universal Dependencies corpora in a simulated low-resource setting, and find improvements of over 10% absolute accuracy in some cases.