2023Q1 Reports: Ethics Committee Co-chairs

(This report is still in progress)

N.B.: This document is authored expressly for the purpose of informing the ACL Executive Board as required for the Quarter 1 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 Q3, the Ethics Committee has made progress on its internal initiatives.

• #Ethics Survey
• #Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
• #Ethics Education and Outreach
• #Committee Scope
• Committee Procedure

The Ethics Education and Outreach and Committee Procedure subcommittees currently have not met due to the summer conference scheduling and various members' unavailability. We expect more progress to be made as the academic semesters start again in the autumn.

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.

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.

Yulia Tsvetkov and Karën Fort and Min-Yen Kan co-chair this subcommittee.

Ethical Reviewing Guidelines

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).

Committee Scope

• For the Diversity and Inclusion role, Luciana has worked to draft a policy for per-conference, minimal guaranteed funding for D&I initiatives. Her work is awaiting further discussion and subsequent vote by the ACL exec.