Abstract
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe
male and female politicians. In this paper, we
aim not to merely study this phenomenon qualitatively, but instead to quantify the degree to
which the language used to describe men and
women is different and, moreover, different in
a positive or negative way. To that end, we introduce a generative latent-variable model that
jointly represents adjective (or verb) choice,
with its sentiment, given the natural gender
of a head (or dependent) noun. We find that
there are significant differences between descriptions of male and female nouns and that
these differences align with common gender
stereotypes: Positive adjectives used to describe women are more often related to their
bodies than adjectives used to describe men