First call for papers: Second Workshop on Ethics in NLP

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
EthNLP
Location: 
NAACL 2018
State: 
LA
Country: 
USA
City: 
New Orleans
Contact: 
Dirk Hovy

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First Call for Papers
Second Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing
NAACL 2018, New Orleans June 5 or 6 2018
http://ethicsinnlp.org
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NLP is a rapidly maturing field. NLP technologies now play a role in business applications and decision processes that affect billions of people on a daily basis. However, increasing amounts of data and computational power also mean increased responsibility and new questions for researchers and practitioners.

This one-day, interdisciplinary workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in NLP with researchers in the humanities, social sciences, public policy, and law to identify and discuss some of the most pressing issues surrounding ethics in NLP, for example: Are we inadvertently building unfair biases into our data sets and models? What information is ethical to infer from user data? How can we prioritize accountability and transparency? What are the big-picture ethical consequences and implications of our work?

The workshop consists of
• invited talks (given by researchers in NLP but also in AI, philosophy, the social sciences, or law);
• contributed talks and posters;
• panel discussions with NLP researchers, ethicists, lawyers, and industry practitioners.

We invite submissions on any area of NLP that touches on the following topics:
• Bias in NLP models (e.g., reporting bias, implicit bias).
• Exclusion and inclusion (e.g., exclusion of certain groups or beliefs, how/when to include stakeholders and representatives for the user population to be served).
• Overgeneralization (e.g., making false classifications on tasks including authorship attribution, NER, knowledge base population).
• Exposure (e.g., underrepresentation/overrepresentation of languages or groups).
• Dual use (e.g., the positive and negative aspects of NLP applications, the close relationship between government and industry interests and NLP research).
• Privacy protection (e.g., anonymization of biomedical documents, best practices for researchers in industry to ensure the privacy of their users’ data, educating the public about how much industry and government may know about them, privacy protection for data annotated with non-linguistic features such as emotion).
• Any other topic which concerns ethical considerations in NLP.

Organizing Committee:
Dirk Hovy, University of Copenhagen
Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence
Shannon Spruit, Technical University Delft
Michael Strube, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies

Contact:
ethicsinnlp [at] googlegroups.com