By Ivan Mehta
Google Translate has previously displayed signs of gender bias by assigning genders to certain adjectives and words describing occupations. Thankfully, the companys rolling out an update to fix this.
The company said that after the update, Google translate will provide both feminine and masculine translations for gender-neutral words:
Historically, it has provided only one translation for a query, even if the translation could have either a feminine or masculine form. So when the model produced one translation, it inadvertently replicated gender biases that already existed. For example: it would skew masculine for words like strong or doctor, and feminine for other words, like nurse or beautiful.
Right now, this update is applicable to translations from English to French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish. Additionally, when you translate from a gender-neutral language like Turkish, youll get two results as shown below:
You can try out Google Translate on the web here to test the companys claims. The search giant said that itll roll out these improvements to Translates iOS and Android apps soon.
The Mountain View company noted on the blog that its determined to remove gender bias from its products, and its working on improving the auto-complete feature for search queries next. Recently, Google removed some auto-complete suggestions from Gmail, as they were leaning towards one gender.
Its good to see companies working on removing gender bias in technology products. While such biases are essentially a reflection of how humans use these tools, experts have warned that it can hardwire sexism in people so its important to adjust for that and build technologies to serve humanity better.
This article was originally written by Ivan Mehta for The Next Web.