Grammatical Gender's Influence on Distributional Semantics: A Causal
  Perspective
Karolina Stańczak Kevin Du Adina Williams Isabelle Augenstein Ryan Cotterell
How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active
area of research in modern linguistics and cognitive science. We can view
current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a
spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically
determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian
hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people
conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to
modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal
graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's
grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past
results, we find a relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives
which modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, we
find that grammatical gender has a near-zero effect on adjective choice,
thereby calling the neo-Whorfian hypothesis into question.