October 09, 2019
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.
Publisher
EMNLP
Research Topics
April 22, 2024
Vasu Sharma *, Karthik Padthe *, Newsha Ardalani, Kushal Tirumala, Russ Howes, Hu Xu, Bernie Huang, Daniel Li (FAIR), Armen Aghajanyan, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer
April 22, 2024
April 14, 2024
Heng-Jui Chang, Ning Dong (AI), Ruslan Mavlyutov, Sravya Popuri, Andy Chung
April 14, 2024
April 05, 2024
Suyu Ge, Chunting Zhou, Rui Hou, Madian Khabsa, Yi-Chia Wang, Qifan Wang, Jiawei Han, Yuning Mao
April 05, 2024
February 21, 2024
Tom Sander, Pierre Fernandez, Alain Durmus, Matthijs Douze, Teddy Furon
February 21, 2024
Product experiences
Foundational models
Product experiences
Latest news
Foundational models