What's in a name? In some languages, grammatical gender

This paper presents an investigation of the relation between words and their gender in two gendered languages: German and Romanian. Gender is an issue that has long preoccupied linguists and baffled language learners. We verify the hypothesis that gender is dictated by the general sound patterns of a language, and that it goes beyond suffixes or word endings. Experimental results on German and Romanian nouns show strong support for this hypothesis, as gender prediction can be done with high accuracy based on the form of the words.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Vivi Nastase, Marius Popescu
• Keywords: EMNLP 2009, Gender, Gender Prediction, General Sound Patterns, Natural Language Processing