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.

Collaborative grounding is a fundamental aspect of human-human dialog which allows people to negotiate meaning. In this paper we argue that it is missing from current deep learning approaches to dialog. Our central point is that making mistakes and being able to recover from them collaboratively is a key ingredient in grounding meaning. We illustrate the pitfalls of being unable to ground collaboratively, discuss what can be learned from the language acquisition and dialog systems literature, and reflect on how to move forward.

In the visual dialog task GuessWhat?! two players maintain a dialog in order to identify a secret object in an image. Computationally, this is modeled using a question generation module and a guesser module for the questioner role and an answering model, the Oracle, to answer the generated questions. This raises a question: what’s the risk of having an imperfect oracle model?. Here we present work in progress in the study of the impact of different answering models in human generated questions in GuessWhat?!. We show that having access to better quality answers has a direct impact on the guessing task for human dialog and argue that better answers could help train better question generation models.

In order to interpret the communicative intents of an utterance, it needs to be grounded in something that is outside of language; that is, grounded in world modalities. In this paper, we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make explicit the process of interpreting the communicative intents of the speaker’s utterances by grounding them in the various modalities in which the dialogue is situated. This paper frames dialogue clarification mechanisms as an understudied research problem and a key missing piece in the giant jigsaw puzzle of natural language understanding. We discuss both the theoretical background and practical challenges posed by this problem and propose a recipe for obtaining grounding annotations. We conclude by highlighting ethical issues that need to be addressed in future work.