Lauscher et al propose five pronoun rules for NLP models

"The world of pronouns is changing," three NLP researchers write in a 2022 COLING paper that two of the specialists in our directory have shared: "from a closed word class with few members to an open set of terms to reflect identities." Current language technology, they argue, has not followed.

The paper, published in the ACL Anthology by Anne Lauscher, Archie Crowley and Dirk Hovy, focuses on 3rd person pronouns and what the authors call "various phenomena like neopronouns, i.e., novel pronoun sets that are not (yet) widely established." The abstract argues current modelling of these pronouns "contributes to the discrimination of marginalized and underrepresented groups, e.g., non-binary individuals" and runs against "one of the UN's sustainable development goals (goal 5)."

The contribution is a set of five desiderata for modelling pronouns, validated through a survey, then applied to existing and novel approaches. The authors say they "quantify the impact of a more discrimination-free approach on an established benchmark dataset."

The abstract does not list the five desiderata, name the benchmark, or publish the quantified impact.