2025Q1 Reports: Ethics Committee Co-chairs
Prior Reports: ['24 Q1] ['24 Q3]
N.B.: This document is authored expressly for the purpose of informing the ACL Executive Board as required for the Quarter 1 2025 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
We would like to put on the record thanks to our at-large committee members and past co-chairs from the previous term. As the terms of the previous committee members came to an end, new members were invited to join. The first meeting of the committee was held on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. In selecting the new members, we carefully considered geographic and gender diversity, as well as outstanding expertise in ethics in NLP.
- Margot Mieskes – margot.mieskes@h-da.de (University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany)
- Alvin Grissom II – agrissom@haverford.edu (Haverford College, USA)
- Zhijing Jin – jinzhi@ethz.ch (University of Toronto, Canada)
- David Adelani – davlanade@gmail.com (McGill School of Computer Science, Canada)
- Adriana Silvina Pagano – apagano@letras.ufmg.br (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil)
- Seunghun Lee – seunghun@icu.ac.jp (International Christian University, Japan)
As of this time, two conference meetings have been held. As per our ratified convention, the meetings are held every last Wednesday of the month, but rotating 8 hours in time of meeting, so as not to overly (dis)advantage any member in any particular timezone.
Ethics Tutorial, Education and Outreach
Ethics Website. We sought to replicate the success of the ACL Mentorship subcommittee's outreach work in creating a useful website, to store official and authoritative information about ACL's ethical principles and policies. We have established the https://ethics.aclweb.org aclweb.org subdomain website for such purposes, and have reorganised the information from our EACL 2022 tutorial and the Ethics Reading List as a start. There is ongoing work to better explain the reproducible research checklist and to compile a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sheet.
Ethics Tutorial. The tutorial titled "Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP: Hands-on Strategies for Students and Researchers" has been officially accepted for presentation at ACL 2025. The authors include the ACL ethics committee co-chairs as well as doctoral students working on NLP ethics: Luciana Benotti, Fanny Ducel, Karën Fort, Guido Ivetta, Zhijing Jin, Min-Yen Kan, Seunghun Lee and Minzhi Li.
The tutorial seeks to fulfill the community's need for clearer ethical guidelines and training, as requested by ACL membership in the ACL Ethics Committee survey in 2022. The key objectives include:
- Raising awareness about ethical challenges in NLP research.
- Providing hands-on experience with ethical review processes.
- Training participants on writing ethical consideration sections in research papers.
- Creating and disseminating publicly available tutorial materials.
- Encouraging interactive discussions on ethical dilemmas in NLP.
The methodology incorporates a participatory approach, including case studies, structured interactions, and small-group discussions. Participants will engage in practical exercises to flag papers for ethical review and analyze real-world ethical challenges.
The tutorial will incorporate materials run in the EACL 2022 workshop, which includes materials contributed by prior co-chair, Yulia Tsvetkov. She has given her explicit permission for the materials to be used.