Panel



"Ethical issues in Natural Language processing"

Chair: Alessandro Lenci

November 15th, 2019; 9:30 - 12:30


Natural Language Processing (NLP) is nowadays a mature research field that plays a key role in applications with important and wide-ranging social impact. This unprecedented success of NLP and its increasing presence in everyday life raise crucial ethical issues, like Artificial Intelligence in general. In fact, successful workshops dedicated to ethics in NLP have been organized in 2017 and 2018. The goal of the panel is to foster a discussion on some key ethical topics in NLP research and applications, with a focus on their impact in the Italian community. Themes of the panel include:

  • negative stereotypes (e.g., racial, gender, etc.) in data-driven computational models (e.g. embeddings)
  • sustainability of data- and resource-intense NLP: Can everybody afford competitive NLP research and technology today?
  • the impact of NLP technology in digital society: What advantages and dangers?
  • privacy and NLP: Is NLP a danger for data privacy? How to safeguard both privacy and NLP research?
  • how to foster inclusiveness in the NLP community?
  • what ethical considerations arise in the design and deployment of NLP technologies?
  • what are the best and worst ethical practices in NLP?
  • can NLP help Internet become a better and safer place?

Panelists