2022Q1 Reports: Ethics Committee Co-chairs-Draft

General

The Ethics Committee was established by the ACL on October 6, 2021 [1], appointing a nine person team: three co-chairs with a five-year term, one from each major region of the ACL membership; and six members, each with a three-year term. Effort was made to balance both gender and regional representation. The current membership is:

• Luciana Benotti (Americas)
• Mark Dredze (Americas)
• Karën Fort (Europe, Co-chair)
• Pascale Fung (Asia)
• Dirk Hovy (Europe)
• Min-Yen Kan (Asia, Co-chair)
• Jin-Dong Kim (Asia)
• Malvina Nissim (Europe)
• Yulia Tsvetkov (Europe, Co-chair)

Since the establishment of the committee, the chairs have held their own biweekly meetings to coordinate work, and the committee as a whole has convened monthly meetings to ensure targets are met.

Efforts

The Ethics Committee has made progress on a number of internal initiatives, largely organised around delegated subcommittees to make progress. These include

• #Ethics Survey
• #Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
• #Ethics Education and Outreach
• #Committee Scope
• #Committee Procedure

Ethics Survey

The AEC created and fielded a ACL membership-wide survey to capture ACL members' opinions about CL/NLP ethics. The AEC felt that this work was a key area to establish the foundation of the AEC, as we hope to best understand and serve our membership. While ethical conduct is a requirement in both professional and research committees – such that an ethics committee such as this AEC are necessary — we still sought to better understand the current opinions and understandings that the membership has of this requirement.

Edited over the October—December period of 2021, the survey was launched in mid-January 2021, and was open for a period of approximately three weeks. The survey's eight questions were designed to be short and non-leading as much as possible. The committee will produce a report to be presented at a suitable venue later in 2022, and archived within the AEC's public website in due course.

Yulia Tsetkov and Karën Fort co-chair this subcommittee.

Ethical Reviewing Guidelines

Harmonized ethical reviewing guidelines are a core responsibility of the ARR. The AEC created three separate guidelines to facilitate ethics review, according to role:

• Author: these are the primary guidelines for authors to consider in their work. Importantly, the guidelines do not specify a checklist approach as it is important for authors to consider ethics holistically. That is, authors blindly following a checklist may indeed validate their approach, yet fail to properly account for ethical issues due to their adherence to the checklist rather than following the overarching goals.
• Reviewer: these guidelines guide reviewers to look for common ethical issues that occur in papers. It give examples of hypothetical ethical situations and how these may be a problem that requires further explanation or reconsideration.
• Organizer: these guidelines offer event organizers a set of recommendations to consider implementing. These concern the review timeline, and the organizational structure of the ethical reviewing pool, and the interface between ethics reviewing and other

In constructing the guidelines, the subcommittee aligned ethics guidelines from EACL, NAACL and ACL-ICJNLP 2021 and distilled common practices among the events.

ACL Rolling Review (ARR) is a key venue for *ACL events, following the Exec's agreement to use ARR to channel submissions for all major *ACL conferences and workshops. For the author and reviewer

Committee Scope

The responsibility and the definition of ethics is construed differently among parties. This subcommittee works towards a clearer definition of the scope and responsibilities among the AEC and other internal committees within the ACL.

The committee's current understanding is that the ACL Exec does not have a specific scope for the AEC and in some cases, also not for other subcommittees of the ACL, passing the decision of scope to the subcommittees themselves. This subcommittee thus is working towards crafting an appropriate scope for the AEC's work.

As such, the AEC decided that the scope of the committee would largely be looking towards long-term strategic goals, instead of as an operational team to handle individual ethics cases.

The subcommittee is working towards a clearer demarcation of responsibilities with respect to:

• The ACL Rolling Review (ARR): As the main source and pool of reviewers for *ACL venues, the ARR represents the key venue for fielding and distributing canonical ethical reviewing guidelines. The AEC has no direct jurisdiction over the ARR, but will seek to work together to develop a clear set of guidelines to recommend that ARR adopts. The AEC also does not operate an ethics reviewing pool, although it may serve as a repository of knowledge about who and how to recruit for ethics-based reviews. It is the AEC's hope that the ARR ethical reviewing guidelines epitomises the key decisions agreed by the AEC. We view this partnership as a key element for the AEC. The AEC membership also reflects this, as both Pascale Fung and Dirk Hovy serve in the ARR initiative (Pascale as co-chair and Dirk as Ethics review chair)
• The ACL Anthology: Ethics violations may have repercussions on the publications supported by ACL. The AEC plans to look into a workflow that builds upon current workflows for the Anthology and its interface to publication venues (e.g., conference chairs).
• The ACL Diversity and Inclusion Chair: As ethics spans many disparate viewpoints, diversity and inclusion are a key part. We are building better outreach for D&I for these purposes.
• The ACL Professional Conduct Committee (PCC): Individual member-centric problems that directly affect another individual are understood to be in the scope of the PCC. We are not yet clear Dirk Hovy is also a member of both the AEC and the PCC.

Luciana Benotti, also as NAACL executive board member, chairs this subcommittee.

Committee Procedure

This header centralises efforts to organize the workflow for handling decisions and administrative policies for the AEC.

Meetings: As of this time, the committee has agreed to hold conference calls monthly and chairs meetings biweekly. Most of the work with respect to initiatives are done offline, in their particular subcommittees.

Software Stack: The AEC needs a secure document store for its official minutes and documents. We plan to use public webpages from Github to organize public facing information and to piggyback off of ACL's paid accounts (Office365) for document stores. Our ethics reading list is an example of this.

Communication Policy: The AEC plans to create a communication policy that will guide committee members in discussions about ethics and matters brought to attention to the committee. This is important as the AEC may be scrutinized as a public-facing committee of the ACL.