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 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.

Ethics Survey

We will have completed the processing of the raw results over all nine questions in the survey. We will be reporting our findings at ACL 2023 in a parallel session on Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:15-17:45 in Toronto as part of the parallel tracks.

Our work on the survey indicated a large interest from the ground in having educational outreach, which informed our decision to propose and run an ethics tutorial that ran at EACL 2023 in May, in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

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.