Abstract
As part of growing NLP capabilities, coupled with an awareness of the ethical dimensions of research, questions have been raised about whether particular datasets and tasks should be deemed off-limits for NLP research. We examine this question with respect to a paper on automatic legal sentencing from EMNLP 2019 which was a source of some debate, in asking whether the paper should have been allowed to be published, who should have been charged with making such a decision, and on what basis. We focus in particular on the role of data statements in ethically assessing research, but also discuss the topic of dual use, and examine the outcomes of similar debates in other scientific disciplines.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.261
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2908–2913
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.261
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.261
- Cite (ACL):
- Kobi Leins, Jey Han Lau, and Timothy Baldwin. 2020. Give Me Convenience and Give Her Death: Who Should Decide What Uses of NLP are Appropriate, and on What Basis?. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2908–2913, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Give Me Convenience and Give Her Death: Who Should Decide What Uses of NLP are Appropriate, and on What Basis? (Leins et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.acl-main.261.pdf