2024Q3 Reports: Ethics Committee Co-chairs
N.B.: This document is authored expressly for the purpose of informing the ACL Executive Board as required for the Quarter 3 2024 documentation. It is meant to be read by the ACL Executive Board and is also suitable for the ACL membership and the general public.
Overview
The purview of the ACL Ethics Committee (AEC) is to define a set of guidelines and processes for dealing with ethical concerns, coordinate with the *ACL event ethics chairs on ethical reviewing, and coordinate the ethics resources (Source: ACLWeb).
Our committee is structured with three subcommittees:
Originally, there was a fourth Committee Procedure subcommittee, but because we have not made much progress, we have dissolved this subcommittee and may choose to re-enact it when needed. We discuss each of the three committees' progress, after first discussing changes in leadership.
Changes in Leadership and Membership Composition
Firstly, due to personal reasons, Yulia Tsvekov and Luciana Benotti exchanged their roles as co-chair (Americas) and committee member (Americas), around May 2024.
Luciana takes over the remainder of the co-chair 5-year term, up until the end of September 2026.
We have updated the Formation of the ACL Ethics Committee page as a result of the changeover and the ACL Exec has been duly notified of this internal change.
Secondly, committee members have a term of 3 years, co-chairs for 5 years. This is to give the co-chairs sufficient time and overlap to ensure that programmes and processes started can culminate, and ensure overlap of terms between chairs and committee members, as originally enacted by the 2021 ACL Executive Committee. Currently, the term of our first regular committee members is ending in September, and the committee is preparing itself for renewal.
Finally, the co-chairs have also enlisted the voluntary help of their own subordinates (largely doctoral candidates supervised or working with them) to help execute policy and legislative decisions made by them, as of June 2024. We look forward to reporting on executed output in the next Q1 report.
Committee Scope
Ethical issues specifically related to publications (specifically, misuse of the ethical considerations section) prompted discussion about how to best handle such issues. Due to its strong operational nature, it was felt that a separate committee that had the operational resource would be best positioned to handle such issues. The AEC (this committee) would continue to think more broadly about the implication of current policies and practices but would divest itself of operational concerns where execution would be a large part of its implementation.
As as result, the current ACL Executive formed and appointed members to a new, separate ACL Publication Ethics Committee (PEC), whose scope encompasses ethics concerns surrounding publications (inclusive of plagiarism and improper conduct) which require sufficient operational support. While at current there is sufficient interchange across both groups due to a co-chair in each committee overlapping at the same institution (Kokil Jaidka and Min-Yen Kan; both with NUS), our committees realises that a long term solution is needed, and thus we are currently working on a means to broadly interchange information across both groups: in particular, the AEC is committed to coordinating with the PEC every month by email.
Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
The tripartite (authoring, reviewing, event organising) ethics guidelines are still being compiled, in absorbing the input from the recent sister organizations' LREC–COLING 2024 conference in May (Turin, Italy). We are also revising it in tandem with EMNLP 2024's (Miami, USA) execution, where Luciana Benotti (an AEC co-chair) is co-chairing the ethics review pipeline.
We hope to make the constant revision and update of the experiences of ethics reviewing a live documentation source. To this extent, we compiled the information about the statistics and magnitude of ethics reviewing pipelines over the last five years of ethics review (thanks to the component events chairs). This information will be consolidated into the AEC website (see below).
Ethics Tutorial, Education and Outreach
The AEC broadly believes that the current membership is broadly interested in having a better understanding of ethics and ethical issues surrounding our field's technology and studies to real-world, deployed applications. As such, our subcommittee on this issue has centered on three initiatives: tutorial, video interviews, and a special journal issue on ethics in CL/NLP.
Although we ran an ethics tutorial Understanding Ethics in NLP Authoring and Reviewing at EACL 2023 (May 2023, Dubrovnik), the committee feels that ethics awareness requires renewed and reinforced attention, as the continued growth in the field attracts new authors, practitioners, reviewers and event organisers (conveners). The ethics tutorial is necessarily interactive and requires participation to capture and be sensitive to the nuances of ethics.
As such our plans to update and re-run our ethics tutorial at multiple *ACL venues within the 2024-2025 calendar cycle. Our onboarding of additional Human Resources in terms of the co-chairs' doctoral students represent one way forward with this initiative. Since we have archived and documented all of the tutorial's materials at its associated Github repository link, re-running the tutorial will help to capture additional parties sensitive to ethics and pave the way for a more concerted effort for a standing poll of qualified ethics reviewers and ethics reviewing co-chairs.
We urge the ACL Executive to consider placing sufficient emphasis on ethics; for example, by instructing the joint tutorials/workshops co-chairs to mandate that each major venue to feature the running of an instance of the ethics tutorial, where qualified AEC-certified human resources allow.
Secondly, we are working to centralise all of our ethics resources into a single aclweb-domain based website. Our stocktake of resources showed that there are sufficient resources covering many aspects of ethics but they are not collated effectively for discovery by our membership and the public at large. We have discussed with Nitin Madani (ACL IO officer) on this and we will be rolling this out when we are able to get the basic website working. We plan to re-use the pipeline of GitHub based static webpages used by a few ACL units (in particular the ACL Mentorship group) to build out the facilities.
Thirdly, on the issue of visibility of CL/NLP ethics research, we will likely work towards a special journal issue call for papers themed on ethics, again as part of outreach to build a community of scholars interested in these topics. The Computational Linguistics journal has agreed that this would be within their purview and of interest to its audience.