Ethics consideration sections in natural language processing papers

Luciana Benotti, Patrick Blackburn


Abstract
In this paper, we present the results of a manual classification of all ethical consideration sections for ACL 2021. We also compare how many papers had an ethics consideration section per track and per world region in ACL 2021. We classified papers according to the ethical issues covered (research benefits, potential harms, and vulnerable groups affected) and whether the paper was marked as requiring ethics review by at least one reviewer. Moreover, we discuss recurring obstacles we have observed (highlighting some interesting texts we found along the way) and conclude with three suggestions. We think that this paper may be useful for anyone who needs to write — or review — an ethics section and would like to get an overview of what others have done.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.299
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4509–4516
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.299
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luciana Benotti and Patrick Blackburn. 2022. Ethics consideration sections in natural language processing papers. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4509–4516, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Ethics consideration sections in natural language processing papers (Benotti & Blackburn, EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.emnlp-main.299.pdf