commit	b777f9d80ce8daace4b5b41cccee1fea684d2e95	[log] [tgz]
author	Marc Kupietz <kupietz@ids-mannheim.de>	Sat Mar 07 09:26:20 2026 +0100
committer	Marc Kupietz <kupietz@ids-mannheim.de>	Sat Mar 07 10:23:48 2026 +0100
tree	4a24d93987a4809676b2febc58af4f67b3cd912c

tree: 4a24d93987a4809676b2febc58af4f67b3cd912c

Readme.md

conllu-gender

Reads CoNLL-U format from stdin and annotates German gender-sensitive personal nouns, gendered determiners/pronouns, and neo-pronouns with correct POS (UPOS and XPOS/STTS), lemma, and morphological features. Writes CoNLL-U format to stdout.

Existing annotations for matched tokens are replaced; all other tokens pass through unchanged.

Background

Based on the morphosyntactic analysis in:

Ochs, S. (2026). Die morphosyntaktische Integration neuer Gendersuffixe: Eine korpusbasierte Analyse deutschsprachiger Pressetexte. Gender Linguistics, 2. doi: 10.65020/0619d927

The tool covers all six gender-marker types distinguished by Ochs & Rüdiger (2025):

Type	Examples	Intent	`Gender` feature
Genderstern `*`	`Lehrerin`, `Bürgerinnen`	non-binary	`NonBin`
Doppelpunkt `:`	`Lehrer:in`, `Bürger:innen`	non-binary	`NonBin`
Unterstrich `_`	`Lehrer_in`, `Bürger_innen`	non-binary	`NonBin`
Binnen-I `I`	`LehrerIn`, `LehrerInnen`	binary	`Masc,Fem`
Klammern `()`	`Lehrer(in)`, `Lehrer(innen)`	binary	`Masc,Fem`
Schrägstrich `/`	`Lehrer/in`, `Lehrer/-innen`	binary	`Masc,Fem`

Annotation

Nouns (`NOUN` / `NN`)

Surface form	Lemma	FEATS
`Lehrer*in`	`Lehrer*in`	`Gender=NonBin\|Number=Sing`
`Lehrer*innen`	`Lehrer*in`	`Gender=NonBin\|Number=Plur`
`Lehrer:in`	`Lehrer:in`	`Gender=NonBin\|Number=Sing`
`Lehrer:innen`	`Lehrer:in`	`Gender=NonBin\|Number=Plur`
`Lehrer_in`	`Lehrer_in`	`Gender=NonBin\|Number=Sing`
`LehrerIn`	`LehrerIn`	`Gender=Masc,Fem\|Number=Sing`
`LehrerInnen`	`LehrerIn`	`Gender=Masc,Fem\|Number=Plur`
`Lehrer(in)`	`Lehrer(in)`	`Gender=Masc,Fem\|Number=Sing`
`Lehrer/in`	`Lehrer/in`	`Gender=Masc,Fem\|Number=Sing`
`Lehrer/-innen`	`Lehrer/in`	`Gender=Masc,Fem\|Number=Plur`

The lemma is always the nominative singular of the gender-marked derivate, preserving the original gender marker. Plural markers are stripped and their information encoded in Number=Plur. The Gender feature is retained for plural forms because the marker is still visibly present on the surface form.

Determiners (`DET` / `ART`, `PIAT`, `PWAT`, …)

Common gendered determiners are annotated.

Surface form	Lemma	FEATS
`jede*r`	`jede*r`	`Gender=NonBin`
`jede:r`	`jede:r`	`Gender=NonBin`
`eine*n`	`eine*n`	`Gender=NonBin`
`kein_e`	`kein_e`	`Gender=NonBin`
`die/der`	`die/der`	`Gender=Masc,Fem`

Non-binary markers (*, :, _) yield Gender=NonBin; Schrägstrich (/) yields Gender=Masc,Fem.

Pronouns / Neo-pronouns (`PRON` / `PPER`)

Merged pronoun pairs with gender markers are annotated:

Surface form	Lemma	FEATS
`sie*er`	`sie*er`	`Gender=NonBin`
`er:sie`	`er:sie`	`Gender=NonBin`

Known limitations

Binnen-I with non-final capital (e.g. jedEn, jedEr): these forms embed the capital letter at a non-final position; detection requires morphological analysis beyond simple pattern matching and is not currently supported.
Gendered adjectives (e.g. begeisterte*n): not yet annotated (occur in ~5 % of gendered NP elements per Ochs 2026, §7.3.2).
Inflected case suffixes on gendered nouns (e.g. genitive Lehrers*in, dative plural extra marking): rare and not detected.
Completely novel neo-pronouns (e.g. dier, xier) that do not follow a known pattern cannot be detected by regular expressions.

Usage

# Annotate CoNLL-U input
korapxml2conllu doc.zip | conllu-gender

# Sparse output (only annotated tokens, with their sentence headers)
korapxml2conllu doc.zip | conllu-gender -s

# Pipe with other KorAP annotation tools
korapxml2conllu doc.zip | conllu-cmc | conllu-gender | conllu2korapxml > doc.annotated.zip

Options

Option	Description
`-s`, `--sparse`	Print only tokens that received new annotations (with sentence headers).
`-h`, `--help`	Print usage guide.

Installation

npm

npm install 'git+https://gitlab.ids-mannheim.de/KorAP/conllu-gender.git'

Build from source

npm install

Build standalone binary

npm run pkg-linux   # Linux x64
npm run pkg-macos   # macOS x64
npm run pkg-win     # Windows x64
npm run pkg-all     # all platforms

Testing

npm test

References

Ochs, S. & Rüdiger, J. O. (2025). Of stars and colons: A corpus-based analysis of gender-inclusive orthographies in German press texts. In D. Schmitz, S. D. Stein & V. Schneider (Eds.), Linguistic Intersections of Language and Gender (pp. 31–62). Düsseldorf: düsseldorf university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111388694-003

Ochs, S. (2026). Die morphosyntaktische Integration neuer Gendersuffixe: Eine korpusbasierte Analyse deutschsprachiger Pressetexte. Gender Linguistics, 2. https://doi.org/10.65020/0619d927