On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs

Adina Williams, Ryan Cotterell, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Damián Blasi, Hanna Wallach


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 deeper investigation of these relationships for future work.
Anthology ID:
2021.tacl-1.9
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9
Month:
Year:
2021
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
139–159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.9
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00355
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adina Williams, Ryan Cotterell, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Damián Blasi, and Hanna Wallach. 2021. On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 9:139–159.
Cite (Informal):
On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs (Williams et al., TACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.9.mp4