A research team at the University of Southern California's College of Engineering in the United States analyzed the words in literary works using artificial intelligence (AI) and found that words that refer to men are used four times more than words to refer to women.
According to the Guardian foreign media report on the 27th local time, the university research team reported the results of analyzing the data of about 3,000 English books with AI (artificial intelligence).
The research team used a natural language processing (NLP) method named Entity Recognition (NER) to collect names and gender-denoting words such as female and masculine pronouns in various genres of literature, including romance, science fiction, mystery, and novels.
As a result, the ratio of male and female characters in literature was found to be 4:1.
In other words, there is a 'literary imbalance' in which men appear four times more than women.
"Four times fewer women in literature has a potential impact on people who consume culture," said Mayank Kejriwal, research director at the USC Institute of Information Sciences (ISI).
The researchers also found that the words associated with the gender character also reflected the bias.
Adjectives such as 'weak', 'cheerful', 'pretty', and 'stupid' were attached to women a lot, and words such as 'leadership', 'power', and 'politics' were found to be used frequently for men. .
Akarsh Nagaraj, co-author of the paper, added, "Books are a window into the past, and the writings of authors give us a glimpse into how people perceive and change the world."
This is a 'news pick'.