Talk by Karën Fort: Ethics and NLP (2022-10-12)

[Tristan Miller]

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 (UTC+2):

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).


--
Dr.-Ing. Tristan Miller, Research Scientist
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, 1010 Vienna, Austria | Tel: +43 1 5336112 12
https://logological.org/ | https://punderstanding.ofai.at/