How-to Guides for Specific Audiences: A Corpus and Initial Findings
Nicola Fanton Agnieszka Falenska Michael Roth
Instructional texts for specific target groups should ideally take into
account the prior knowledge and needs of the readers in order to guide them
efficiently to their desired goals. However, targeting specific groups also
carries the risk of reflecting disparate social norms and subtle stereotypes.
In this paper, we investigate the extent to which how-to guides from one
particular platform, wikiHow, differ in practice depending on the intended
audience. We conduct two case studies in which we examine qualitative features
of texts written for specific audiences. In a generalization study, we
investigate which differences can also be systematically demonstrated using
computational methods. The results of our studies show that guides from
wikiHow, like other text genres, are subject to subtle biases. We aim to raise
awareness of these inequalities as a first step to addressing them in future
work.