As part of growing NLP capabilities, coupled with an awareness of the ethical dimensions of research, questions have been raised about whether particular datasets and tasks should be deemed off-limits for NLP research. We examine this question with respect to a paper on automatic legal sentencing from EMNLP 2019 which was a source of some debate, in asking whether the paper should have been allowed to be published, who should have been charged with making such a decision, and on what basis. We focus in particular on the role of data statements in ethically assessing research, but also discuss the topic of dual use, and examine the outcomes of similar debates in other scientific disciplines.
翻译:作为日益增强的国家劳工政策能力的一部分,加上对研究的道德层面的认识,人们提出了是否应将特定数据集和任务视为国家劳工政策研究的禁区的问题,我们研究了关于2019年国家劳工政策网关于自动法律判决的文件的这一问题,该文件是一些辩论的源头,我们询问是否应该允许发表该文件,谁应该负责作出这样的决定,以及依据什么。我们特别侧重于数据声明在伦理评估研究中的作用,但也讨论双重用途的专题,并审查其他科学学科类似辩论的结果。