GenderLectures 2024-25

The winter semester’s GenderLectures series 2024-2025 focuses on the intersection of gender, AI, and language/communication. While the study of language and gender has been well established since the 1970s, exploring topics such as the grammatical encoding of gender in the world’s languages, the impact of biological and social gender in the use of language and, more recently, the appropriate linguistic strategies to achieve gender-inclusive/sensitive communication, recent advances in AI have added new layers of complexity. We increasingly and routinely communicate through and with AI-powered machines, from (gendered) robots, chatbots or dematerialized entities such as large language models (such ChatGPT). AI serves not only as synthetic communication partner, but also as a research tool to explore the relationship between gender and language in new ways.

The GenderLectures 2024-25 will cover topics including: (i) AI's role in gendered communication across different languages and mediums; (ii) the gendered identities assigned to AI, such as their voices and appearances; (iii) the presence of gender biases in the data used to train AI and in their outputs; and (iv) the societal benefits and research value of AI in fostering inclusive communication and addressing gender bias in various contexts.

Speakers will approach these topics from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, computational linguistics, translation studies, robotics, sociology, and psychology, with lectures in English and German. This series is organized by TU Dresden’s GenderConceptGroup and the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies.

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