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 (2026), the tool covers all six gender-marker types distinguished by Ochs & Rüdiger (2025):

Type	Examples	Intent	Gender feature
Genderstern *	Lehrer*in, Bürger*innen	non-binary	Fem,Masc,NonBin
Doppelpunkt :	Lehrer:in, Bürger:innen	non-binary	Fem,Masc,NonBin
Unterstrich _	Lehrer_in, Bürger_innen	non-binary	Fem,Masc,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=Fem,Masc,NonBin|Number=Sing
Lehrer*innen	Lehrer*in	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin|Number=Plur
Lehrer:in	Lehrer:in	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin|Number=Sing
Lehrer:innen	Lehrer:in	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin|Number=Plur
Lehrer_in	Lehrer_in	Gender=Fem,Masc,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=Fem,Masc,NonBin
jede:r	jede:r	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin
eine*n	eine*n	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin
kein_e	kein_e	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin
die/der	die/der	Gender=Masc,Fem

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

Pronouns / Neo-pronouns (PRON / PPER)

Merged pronoun pairs with gender markers receive Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin:

Surface form	Lemma	FEATS
sie*er	sie*er	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin
er:sie	er:sie	Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin

Lexicon-based neo-pronouns are matched by exact surface form (case-insensitive) against a built-in lexicon sourced from pronomen.net. All forms are tagged PRON PPER with Gender=Fem,Masc,NonBin|PronType=Prs; the lemma is the nominative form.

Verschmelzung (blend pronouns)

Paradigm (NOM/DAT)	NOM	GEN	DAT	ACC
sier/siem	sier	sies	siem	sien
xier/xiem	xier	xies	xiem	xien
ersie/ihmihr	ersie	seinihr	ihmihr	ihnsie

They-ähnlich

Paradigm	NOM	GEN	DAT	ACC
dej/denen/dej	dej	(deren)	(denen)	dej
dey/denen/dem	dey	(deren)	(denen)	(dem)
dey/denen/demm	dey	(deren)	(denen)	demm
ey/emm	ey	eys	emm	emm
they/them	they	their	them	them

Forms in italics are excluded from the lexicon because they are homonymous with standard German words (deren, denen, dem).

Neuer Stamm (new-stem pronouns)

Paradigm	NOM	GEN	DAT	ACC
el/em	el	ems	em	en
em/em	em	ems	em	em
en/en	en	enses	en	en
en/em	en	ens	em	en
ens/ens	ens	ens	ens	ens
et/siem	et	sier	siem	sien
ex/ex	ex	ex	ex	ex
hän/sim	hän	sir	sim	sin
hen/hem	hen	hens	hem	hen
hie/hiem	hie	hein	hiem	hie
iks/iks	iks	ikses	iks	iks
ind/inde	ind	inds	inde	ind
mensch/mensch	mensch	menschs	mensch	mensch
nin/nim	nin	nims	nim	nin
oj/ojm	oj	juj	ojm	ojn
per/per	per	pers	per	per
ser/sem	ser	ses	sem	sen
Y/Y	Y	Ys	Y	Y
zet/zerm	zet	zets	zerm	zern
*/* (Stern)	*	*s	*	*

Note: oblique forms of et/siem (sier, siem, sien) are shared with the sier paradigm and annotated with lemma sier.

Known limitations

• The current version is fully recall-oriented for the covered phenomena and uses no contextual disambiguation or machine learning. Thus the precision is expected to be very low, especially for determiner/pronoun annotation, but also in the case of wrong tokenizations of <word>:in.
• 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.
• Ambiguous neo-pronoun forms: dem, deren, denen are excluded from the neo-pronoun lexicon as they are indistinguishable from standard German determiners/pronouns without syntactic context. per is included despite its use as a preposition.

Usage

# Annotate CoNLL-U input
conllu-gender < ./test/data/gender.conllu

# Sparse output (only annotated tokens, with their sentence headers)
conllu-gender -s < ./test/data/gender.conllu

# Create annotation for KorAP XML ZIP archive
korapxmltool -A "conllu-gender -s" -t zip wdd24.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, Samira/Rüdiger, Jan Oliver (2025): Of stars and colons: A corpus-based analysis of gender-inclusive orthographies in German press texts. In: Schmitz, Dominic/Stein, Simon David/Schneider, Viktoria (eds.): Linguistic intersections of language and gender. Of gender bias and gender fairness. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 31–62. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111388694.

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