The statistical regularities in language corpora encode well-known social biases into word embeddings. Here, we focus on gender to provide a comprehensive analysis of group-based biases in widely-used static English word embeddings trained on internet corpora (GloVe 2014, fastText 2017). Using the Single-Category Word Embedding Association Test, we demonstrate the widespread prevalence of gender biases that also show differences in: (1) frequencies of words associated with men versus women; (b) part-of-speech tags in gender-associated words; (c) semantic categories in gender-associated words; and (d) valence, arousal, and dominance in gender-associated words. First, in terms of word frequency: we find that, of the 1,000 most frequent words in the vocabulary, 77% are more associated with men than women, providing direct evidence of a masculine default in the everyday language of the English-speaking world. Second, turning to parts-of-speech: the top male-associated words are typically verbs (e.g., fight, overpower) while the top female-associated words are typically adjectives and adverbs (e.g., giving, emotionally). Gender biases in embeddings also permeate parts-of-speech. Third, for semantic categories: bottom-up, cluster analyses of the top 1,000 words associated with each gender. The top male-associated concepts include roles and domains of big tech, engineering, religion, sports, and violence; in contrast, the top female-associated concepts are less focused on roles, including, instead, female-specific slurs and sexual content, as well as appearance and kitchen terms. Fourth, using human ratings of word valence, arousal, and dominance from a ~20,000 word lexicon, we find that male-associated words are higher on arousal and dominance, while female-associated words are higher on valence.

研究发现，英语语料库中的统计规律将社会中已知的性别偏见编码为词嵌入中的群体偏见。使用单类别词嵌入关联测试，作者发现广泛存在性别偏差，这些偏差在词频、词性标记、语义类别和情绪情感方面均有所不同。男性更倾向于与技术、工程、宗教、体育和暴力等概念相关联，而女性则偏向于涉及外观和厨房等领域。同时，男性相关的词汇具有更强的情绪唤起和主导性，而女性相关的词汇则更加温馨。

词向量中的性别偏见: 频率、语法和语义的全面分析