Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP

Vagrant Gautam, Arjun Subramonian, Anne Lauscher, Os Keyes

Abstract
Personal names simultaneously differentiate individuals and categorize them in ways that are important in a given society. While the natural language processing community has thus associated personal names with sociodemographic characteristics in a variety of tasks, researchers have engaged to varying degrees with the established methodological problems in doing so. To guide future work that uses names and sociodemographic characteristics, we provide an overview of relevant research: first, we present an interdisciplinary background on names and naming. We then survey the issues inherent to associating names with sociodemographic attributes, covering problems of validity (e.g., systematic error, construct validity), as well as ethical concerns (e.g., harms, differential impact, cultural insensitivity). Finally, we provide guiding questions along with normative recommendations to avoid validity and ethical pitfalls when dealing with names and sociodemographic characteristics in natural language processing.
Anthology ID:
2024.gebnlp-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Agnieszka Faleńska, Christine Basta, Marta Costa-jussà, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Debora Nozza
Venues:
GeBNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
323–337
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.gebnlp-1.20
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vagrant Gautam, Arjun Subramonian, Anne Lauscher, and Os Keyes. 2024. Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP), pages 323–337, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP (Gautam et al., GeBNLP-WS 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.gebnlp-1.20.pdf
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