2023Q3 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 2023 documentation. It is meant to be read by the ACL Executive Board and is also suitable for the ACL membership and the general public.

Efforts

After 2023 Q1, the Ethics Committee has made progress on its internal initiatives.

• #Ethics Survey
• #Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
• #Ethics 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 quarter, so we have left them out of this update.

Ethics Survey

We have made substantial progress on the survey raw results where we have annotated all 9 questions and are working on reconciling differences such that the final report and its associated statistics are ready for dissemination by the ACL conference. We have approached the ACL conference chairs for a plenary session or similar to best reach our intended broad audience of our entire community and look forward to the ACL 2023's General and PC chairs communication about how best to disseminate our findings.

Our work on the survey indicated a large interest from the ground in having educational outreach, which informed our decision to propose an ethics tutorial, described 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.

With generative NLP tools, such as ChatGPT being now widely available, the committee noted the ACL 2023 author and reviewing guidelines that took a stand. The guidelines mandated that authors / reviewers who use such tools be held entirely responsible for the veracity / authenticity of the generated content.

After feedback from our members, the committee feels that the guidelines were adjusted to be appropriately phrased.

This subcommittee is chaired by Yulia Tsvetkov, assisted by Karën Fort.

Ethics Education and Outreach

We submitted a tutorial proposal understanding ethics in NLP and authoring and reviewing issues. This was accepted by the ACL-EMNLP joint workshop chairs to be featured at EACL (May, Dubrovnik).

Luciana Benotti, Karën Fort, Min-Yen Kan and Yulia Tsvetkov are the presenters and authors for the tutorial.

Secondly, we have discussed having 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. We have engaged in dialogue with the _Computational Linguistics_ journal (which agreed to the idea in principle) and to the _Transaction of the ACL_ (for which the idea was not viable).

As a committee, we plan to execute on the CL special issue later after the main work on the survey is completed (before ACL).