Predicting and Explaining French Grammatical Gender

Abstract

Grammatical gender may be determined by semantics, orthography, phonology, or could even be arbitrary. Identifying patterns in the factors that govern noun genders can be useful for language learners, and for understanding innate linguistic sources of gender bias. Traditional manual rule-based approaches may be substituted by more accurate and scalable but harder-to-interpret computational approaches for predicting gender from typological information. In this work, we propose interpretable gender classification models for French, which obtain the best of both worlds. We present high accuracy neural approaches which are augmented by a novel global surrogate based approach for explaining predictions. We introduce auxiliary attributes to provide tunable explanation complexity.