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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

Alternate wording: "Google's Gmail autocomplete no longer assumes gender."

From the article:

> Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her.”

So really, this is a fairly reasonable decision whereby it doesn't infer gender from signals such as profession.

The article doesn't address this, but I wonder what it would do given an explicit gender, e.g. "She's the investor I am meeting next week."

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> it doesn't infer gender from signals such as profession

I'm struggling to tell from the article if Smart Compose ever actually did that. It's certainly implied, but the explanation given about gender balance in different fields is offered by the reporter. The parts actually attributed to Googlers only say they're being cautious about gendering in their outputs and couldn't find a fully-acceptable solution. Which leaves me curious they found specific semantic biases or instead noticed general issues like "our corpus taught the NLG to use a masculine default and simple fixes like randomizing pronouns created new issues".

(Either way, it seems like a reasonable decision. I'm just wishing for a more technical breakdown out of engineering curiosity.)

The other interesting point I saw is that Smart Reply apparently runs on the same system as Smart Complete. Since that offers fully-formed ideas, I imagine gender issues there could be vastly more embarrassing than single-word autocompletions.

True, doing antecedent linking would be neat. I think that would be a good solution in order to get highest 100% accuracy. Although, if it linked the antecedent incorrectly, it could still put them in controversy.

Yeah, this is a hard problem and they probably still have mistakes in front of them. Still, though, I think "we misidentified the antecedent in this sentence" is easier to forgive than "we incorrectly assumed a gender based on profession". The former is just a grammar parsing bug, while the latter carries a lot of cultural baggage.

So what does it follow up with? English doesn't have a non-gendered way to say "Do you want to meet him/her?"

Is the idea just to eliminate all useful suggestions that contain genders?

To my ear, as a 34 year old native English speaker from Scotland, the phrase "Do you want to meet them?", meaning non-gendered singular pronoun, sounds absolutely totally fine and not strange in even the slightest way, and always has done since I was a child.

As a native English speaker in the US, it just sounds like bad grammar.

If Google had made this change quietly I suspect no one would have even noticed.

"Do you want to meet them?"

"Do you want to meet the <noun>?"

"Do you want to meet <name>?"

"Do you want to meet ___" <prompt for autocomplete from set of pronouns>

etc.

"Do you want to meet them?" is perfectly acceptable. People seem to have no issues using it to refer to me, somebody who doesn't feel particularly at ease with referring to themself as either "him" or "her".

I'm not going to repeat myself - my opinions on that topic are recorded in the comments of the article about Richard Stallman's opinion of "singular they".

As mentioned in other comments, "them" works fine. It has been such a convention for hundreds of years.

If this is a system that groks the meaning of the input text and constructs original text to match, then sure, it could just use non-gendered language.

But that seems unlikely - we're probably talking about an engine that just recommends whatever occurs frequently in its corpus (hence the article talking about the team black-listing swear words and so forth). In which case adding gendered pronouns to the list seems reasonable enough, and non-gendered forms will presumably show up regardless (to whatever extent they appear in the corpus).

What? Of course it does. "Do you want to meet them?" or "do you want to meet the (noun)" etc.

People use English this way constantly and it's well understood.

Singular they has been used for centuries in this way.

Singular they works and has been used since the 1300's.

Say do you want to meet them? would work fine in this case.

'Vincent is in the lobby, do you want to meet them now?' Them who? Vincent and his unannounced friends? Maybe Vincent is actually 3 kids stacked on top of each other in a trench coat?

They is not singular. Replacing gendered pronouns with 'they' shits the flow of the sentence and creates ambiguity. There's a whole class of expressions that just stop working without a singular pronoun, hence the proposed 'ze' or whatever it is these days.

And what do you propose for all the languages where nouns and verbs and adjectives are gendered? In Russian, using gender-neutral phrasing when speaking about someone is an insult that implies that they're a thing rather than a person.

"They" is commonly used as a singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun in English — so much so that it's often unconscious. I glanced through your comments; you used it yourself just yesterday [1]:

> Anecdote time: a friend from one of the nation's major universities was involved in a road authority funded study to evaluate the safety impact of newly installed speed cameras at several intersections. [...] They found there was none.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18532386

Edit: after I replied, you edited your comment to add the caveat "except sometimes in 3rd person". "They" is always a third-person pronoun, and there are no criteria that would make it acceptable only in a subset of situations.

Edit 2: now the caveat is gone. Can you just reply to me rather than changing what I'm replying to retroactively?

Your comment-stalk sample is bad though because that could easily refer to the administrators of the study or everyone who ran the study. The sentence you are trying to link to it is about the friend being involved in the study, not being the one coming up with findings.

> Vincent is in the lobby, do you want to meet them now?' Them who? Vincent and his unannounced friends? Maybe Vincent is actually 3 kids stacked on top of each other in a trench coat?

My them example was in reference to the parent's phrase, not a general prescriptive. And in your example, while them would be a bit odd, from context you can gather them refers to Vincent alone. If there were further people one would likely be saying Vincent and his children are in the lobby, do you want to meet them now? In either case, I was primarily referring to they.

> And what do you propose for all the languages where nouns and verbs and adjectives are gendered?

I don't. I was explaining they usage that a lot of english speakers seem to not be aware of. I agree with this linguist: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/08/singular-they-prono...

"Do you want to meet them?" works here.

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