Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of mind and action, metaphysics, and ethics. He has published on free will and the impact of machine learning on ethical decisions. Katherine Bailey (Acquia) is a researcher and team leader in industry. Her recent work has been on machine learning applications for natural language processing and other fields. She is pioneering a "fewshot learning" approach which promises greater efficiency in machine learning. Katherine has spoken at international conferences on both the technical details of artificial intelligence and the ethical issues that arise from its use in a variety of contexts. Francien Dechesne (Leiden University, The Netherlands), is a researcher at the Center for Law and Digital Technologies (eLaw) of the Leiden Law School, and lecturer at TU Eindhoven. Her research lies at the intersection between societal and ethical issues of information and communication technologies, including the question of how to balance public, commercial, and individual interests in data-driven innovations. In particular, her research focuses on potential negative societal impact of decisions based on data-analytics, and the design of accountability mechanisms to address this impact. We received fewer paper submissions than in the previous year, but present a large range of topics, addressing issues related to overgeneralization, dual use, privacy protection, bias in NLP models, underrepresentation, fairness, and more. Authors share insights about the intersection of NLP and ethics in academic, industrial, and clinical work. We selected three papers for oral presentation. Due to the involvement of different disciplines with differing publication traditions, we also offered a non-archival submission option, which means not all papers presented at the workshop are included here. We are glad to see the continued interest in this important topic and hope that this workshop will help defining ethical issues in NLP, and raising awareness of ethical considerations throughout the community.

Text-based inference of moral sentiment change

“…While there is emerging awareness of ethical issues in NLP (Hovy et al, 2017;Alfano et al, 2018), work exploiting NLP techniques to study principles of moral sentiment change is scarce. Moreover, since morality is variable across cultures and time (Graham et al, 2013;Bloom, 2010), developing systems that capture the diachronic nature of moral sentiment will be a pivotal research direction.…”

Use of Formal Ethical Reviews in NLP Literature: Historical Trends and Current Practices

“…Several other works have proposed best practices for dealing with ethical implications of NLP research and deployment (Prabhumoye et al, 2019;Leidner and Plachouras, 2017;Bender and Friedman, 2018;Schnoebelen, 2017). There is now an increased awareness around this topic with a number of workshops and tutorials on ethics at NLP conferences (Tsvetkov et al, 2018;Hovy et al, 2017;Alfano et al, 2018) NAACL 2021 and ACL 2021 1 now recommend the inclusion of broader impact statement in their papers, which allows for authors to introspect and be mindful of the ethical implications their research poses.…”

Just What do You Think You're Doing, Dave?' A Checklist for Responsible Data Use in NLP

“…In NLP, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) has adopted the ACM code of ethics (Gotterbarn et al, 2018), conducted a series of workshops (Hovy et al, 2017;Alfano et al, 2018), and, most recently, implemented ethics reviews and submission guidelines. 1 But we are far from a set of rules that would account for all the diverse types of NLP data and applications.…”