Ethical aspects of research in language technologies have received much attention recently. It is a standard practice to get a study involving human subjects reviewed and approved by a professional ethics committee/board of the institution. How commonly do we see mention of ethical approvals in NLP research? What types of research or aspects of studies are usually subject to such reviews? With the rising concerns and discourse around the ethics of NLP, do we also observe a rise in formal ethical reviews of NLP studies? And, if so, would this imply that there is a heightened awareness of ethical issues that was previously lacking? We aim to address these questions by conducting a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the ACL Anthology, as well as comparing the trends in our field to those of other related disciplines, such as cognitive science, machine learning, data mining, and systems.
翻译:语言技术研究的道德方面最近受到很大关注,要求该机构的职业道德委员会/理事会审查和批准一项涉及人类主题的研究是一种标准做法;我们如何经常看到在国家语言规划研究中提及道德认可?研究的哪些类型或方面通常要接受这种审查?随着人们对国家语言规划伦理的日益关注和讨论,我们是否也注意到对国家语言规划研究的正式道德审查有所上升?如果是这样的话,这是否意味着对以前缺乏的伦理问题有了更深刻的认识?我们的目标是解决这些问题,对ACL Anthlogy进行详细的定量和定性分析,并将我们领域的趋势与认知科学、机器学习、数据挖掘和系统等其他有关学科的趋势进行比较。