Abstract:
To raise awareness among future NLP practitioners and
prevent inertia in the field, we need to place ethics in the curriculum for all
NLP student--not as an elective, but as a core part of their education. Our
goal in this tutorial is to empower NLP researchers and practitioners with
tools and resources to teach others about how to ethically apply NLP
techniques. We will present both high-level strategies for developing an
ethics-oriented curriculum, based on experience and best practices, as well as
specific sample exercises that can be brought to a classroom. This highly
interactive work session will culminate in a shared online resource page that
pools lesson plans, assignments, exercise ideas, reading suggestions, and ideas
from the attendees. Though the tutorial will focus particularly on examples for
university classrooms, we believe these ideas can extend to company-internal
workshops or tutorials in a variety of organizations. In this setting, a key
lesson is that there is no single approach to ethical NLP: each project
requires thoughtful consideration about what steps can be taken to best support
people affected by that project. However, we can learn (and teach) what issues
to be aware of, what questions to ask, and what strategies are available to
mitigate harm.