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Robert G.'s avatar

This is only tangentially related, but your use of ambiguous pronouns is similar to the Winograd Schema Challenge used for testing AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_schema_challenge

Essentially, the challenge consists of using pronouns in grammatically ambiguous ways that are made clear by cultural context. For example, who is "they" in the following:

1. The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence.

2. The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence.

Most people would say that the councilmen are "they" in sentence 1 and the demonstrators are "they" in sentence 2. But this is due to knowledge about councilmen and protesters rather than the structure of the sentence. Current AI models do pretty well on them, but the argument about whether that's because they "know" about protests is too philosophical for me.

I'd be curious if pronoun disambiguation could be used to measure political or social beliefs. In the sentences, "Alan disliked Jamal because he was racist" and "Jamal disliked Alan because he was racist" I'd assume that the pronoun was standing in for Alan in both. Most Americans would probably agree, based off of common beliefs about names and who is racist.. But something like "The board members couldn't settle with the unions because they were greedy" or "Women argue with their husbands because they're immature" would probably have some readers reading them completely differently without seeing ambiguity.

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Tara's avatar

It's interesting to consider how pronouns work in languages with gendered nouns.

In German, the words for "child" and "girl" are both neuter: das Kind, das Mädchen. And pronouns follow the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to, not the real-life gender of the person they refer to: "Das Mädchen nimmt einen Apfel. Es isst ihn." uses a neuter pronoun for the girl, and a masculine pronoun for the apple. So on the one hand, they're forced to be a little less uptight about how people refer to them in the third person; on the other hand, they run into conflicts between pronouns in entirely different places. But sometimes this allows for less ambiguity: "Der Hund sieht ein Kind. Es mag ihn nicht." makes it clear that it's the child who doesn't like the dog, not vice versa.

And as annoying as they/they conflicts are in English, German does it one better by making "they" and formal "you" grammatically identical, distinguished only by capitalization. There's no way to know whether "Sie lesen ein Buch" means "you're reading a book" or "they're reading a book" without context.

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