Beyond Good Intentions: Reporting the Research Landscape of NLP for Social Good

Fernando Adauto, Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Schölkopf, Tom Hope, Mrinmaya Sachan, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract
With the recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), a vast number of applications have emerged across various use cases. Among the plethora of NLP applications, many academic researchers are motivated to do work that has a positive social impact, in line with the recent initiatives of NLP for Social Good (NLP4SG). However, it is not always obvious to researchers how their research efforts are tackling today’s big social problems. Thus, in this paper, we introduce NLP4SGPapers, a scientific dataset with three associated tasks that can help identify NLP4SG papers and characterize the NLP4SG landscape by: (1) identifying the papers that address a social problem, (2) mapping them to the corresponding UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and (3) identifying the task they are solving and the methods they are using. Using state-of-the-art NLP models, we address each of these tasks and use them on the entire ACL Anthology, resulting in a visualization workspace that gives researchers a comprehensive overview of the field of NLP4SG. Our website is available at https://nlp4sg.vercel.app . We released our data at https://huggingface.co/datasets/feradauto/NLP4SGPapers and code at https://github.com/feradauto/nlp4sg
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.31
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
415–438
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.31
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.31
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fernando Adauto, Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Schölkopf, Tom Hope, Mrinmaya Sachan, and Rada Mihalcea. 2023. Beyond Good Intentions: Reporting the Research Landscape of NLP for Social Good. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 415–438, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Good Intentions: Reporting the Research Landscape of NLP for Social Good (Adauto et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2023.findings-emnlp.31.pdf
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