Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution

Correctly resolving textual mentions of people fundamentally entails making inferences about those people. Such inferences raise the risk of systemic biases in coreference resolution systems, including biases that reinforce cis-normativity and can harm binary and non-binary trans (and cis) stakeholders. To better understand such biases, we foreground nuanced conceptualizations of gender from sociology and sociolinguistics, and investigate where in the machine learning pipeline such biases can enter a system. We inspect many existing datasets for trans-exclusionary biases, and develop two new datasets for interrogating bias in crowd annotations and in existing coreference resolution systems. Through these studies, conducted on English text, we confirm that without acknowledging and building systems that recognize the complexity of gender, we will build systems that fail for: quality of service, stereotyping, and over- or under-representation.