Commercial applications of natural language processing have now invaded our daily lives, with consequences that raise difficult ethical questions. These questions will be discussed in "Ethics and NLP: What we Talk About, What we Don't Talk About Anymore, What we Never Talked About", an invited talk by Karën Fort of Sorbonne Université / LORIA. The talk is part of OFAI's 2022 Lecture Series.
Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom on Wednesday, 12 October 2022 at 18:30 CEST:
URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868
Talk abstract: In recent years, ethics has become a recognized subject in the fields of AI and more particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This recent development is due to several factors, including the fact that NLP has become commercially attractive enough to leave research laboratories and invade our daily lives, with immediately visible consequences for the general public. I will return in this presentation to the evolution of the subject over the last decade, which has seen certain issues become obvious (such as the remuneration of click workers) and no longer be discussed, while others (notably the biases in language models) take center stage, obscuring the most difficult questions.
Speaker biography: Karën Fort is Associate Professor at Sorbonne Université and does her research at the LORIA laboratory in Nancy. Her primary research interest is manual annotation for natural language processing (NLP), which she extended to crowdsourcing annotation, in particular using Games With A Purpose (GWAPs). She also developed an interest in ethics in NLP and organized the first colloquium on the subject in 2014, in France, followed by a national workshop (ETeRNAL) and a special issue of the TAL journal in 2016. She initiated the ethics and NLP French blog as well as the survey on ethics in NLP (Fort & Couillault, 2016). She was co-chair of the first two ethics committees in the field (EMNLP 2020 and NAACL 2021) and is co-chair of the ethics committee of the association for computational linguistics (ACL).
