How-to Guides for Specific Audiences: A Corpus and Initial Findings

Nicola Fanton, Agnieszka Falenska, Michael Roth


Abstract
Instructional texts for specific target groups should ideally take into account the prior knowledge and needs of the readers in order to guide them efficiently to their desired goals. However, targeting specific groups also carries the risk of reflecting disparate social norms and subtle stereotypes. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which how-to guides from one particular platform, wikiHow, differ in practice depending on the intended audience. We conduct two case studies in which we examine qualitative features of texts written for specific audiences. In a generalization study, we investigate which differences can also be systematically demonstrated using computational methods. The results of our studies show that guides from wikiHow, like other text genres, are subject to subtle biases. We aim to raise awareness of these inequalities as a first step to addressing them in future work.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-srw.46
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Vishakh Padmakumar, Gisela Vallejo, Yao Fu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
321–333
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-srw.46
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-srw.46
Award:
 SRW Best Paper Award
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicola Fanton, Agnieszka Falenska, and Michael Roth. 2023. How-to Guides for Specific Audiences: A Corpus and Initial Findings. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 321–333, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How-to Guides for Specific Audiences: A Corpus and Initial Findings (Fanton et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-srw.46.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-srw.46.mp4