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 structure with four subcommittees:
- #Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
- #Ethics Tutorial, Education and Outreach
- #Committee Scope
- Committee Procedure
The Committee Procedure and Committee Scope subcommittees have not made much progress suitable for reporting since the previous half year, so we have left them out of this update. We first discuss two issues that consumed most of the deliberative bandwidth of our committee.
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programmes and processes started can culminate, and ensure overlap of terms between chairs and committee members, as originally enacted by the 2021 ACL Executive Committee.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, 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.
Ethics Survey
The report is deposited as part of the archival resources for the EACL tutorial (mentioned below):
Yulia Tsvetkov and Karën Fort and Min-Yen Kan all co-chair this subcommittee.
Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
Conferences and other events have largely taken ethics directive from the ARR Ethics guidelines for which our committee has offered our feedback on, through shared committee members (Dirk Hovy and Pascale Fung).
As part of the outreach effort at ACL 2023, Dirk Hovy will report on our tripartite (authoring, reviewing, event organising) guidelines. We will highlight some specific challenges of ensuring that ethics reviewing is considered a first-class duty, alongside and complementary to scientific reviewing.
This subcommittee is chaired by Yulia Tsvetkov, assisted by Karën Fort.
Ethics Tutorial, Education and Outreach
We ran an ethics tutorial Understanding Ethics in NLP Authoring and Reviewing at EACL 2023 (May, Dubrovnik).
Luciana Benotti, Karën Fort, Min-Yen Kan and Yulia Tsvetkov were the presenters and authors for the tutorial.
As part of the charges for the tutorial, we created educational resources in terms of an introductory 60-minute presentation merging two of the authors' (Karen and Yulia's) lecture notes. We also created a number of problematic synthetic abstracts (based on real studies, but without the stigma that would be result from attributing a problematic abstract to an author) for participants to analyse. We also described materials such as the reviewing guidelines, ethics reading list, and an analyses of Ethical Considerations and Limitations sections in NLP/CL papers (contributed by Luciana Benotti) as part of the tutorial's open-source contents.
At EACL 2023, we had about 20 participants in total join the tutorial, with 1 remote participant.
We have archived and documented all of the tutorial's materials at its associated Github repository link. The ACL Ethics Committee Report on its 2021 Survey (mentioned above) is also deposited there as well:
https://github.com/acl-org/ethics-tutorial
With ACL 2023 culminating in the successful delivery of the survey, and EACL 2023 the tutorial, 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.