Mind the inclusivity gap : multilingual gender-neutral translation evaluation with mGeNTE

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Savoldi, B., Attanasio, G., Cupin, E., Gkovedarou, EG, Hackenbuchner, J., Lauscher, A., Negri, M., Piergentili, A., Thind, M., & Bentivogli, L.
Editor
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose and Violet Peng
Series
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Pagination
13709-13731
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Conference
2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025) (Suzhou, China)
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Abstract

Avoiding the propagation of undue (binary) gender inferences and default masculine language remains a key challenge towards inclusive multilingual technologies, particularly when translating into languages with extensive gendered morphology. Gender-neutral translation (GNT) represents a linguistic strategy towards fairer communication across languages. However, research on GNT is limited to a few resources and language pairs. To address this gap, we introduce mGeNTE, an expert-curated resource, and use it to conduct the first systematic multilingual evaluation of inclusive translation with state-of-the-art instruction-following language models (LMs). Experiments on en-es/de/it/el reveal that while models can recognize when neutrality is appropriate, they cannot consistently produce neutral translations, limiting their usability. To probe this behavior, we enrich our evaluation with interpretability analyses that identify task-relevant features and offer initial insights into the internal dynamics of LM-based GNT.