Research ethics: Gender as a variable in NLP

I’ve previously posted on the talk I’m giving today (April 4) at EACL in Valencia. This post provides the slides with the accompanying notes. (If you are reading this before US Eastern bedtime on April 4, it may not be the final version, as I’m editing the slides while watching the earlier presentations during the day.) Here, again, for your reading pleasure, is the abstract of the paper I submitted at EACL, but note that the last couple slides go far afield of the specific paper…

Researchers in natural-language processing (NLP) and related fields should at- tend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results. This article offers an ethical framework for using gender as a variable in NLP studies and proposes four guidelines for researchers and practitioners. The principles outlined here should guide practitioners, researchers, and peer reviewers, and they may be applicable to other social categories, such as race, applied to human beings connected to NLP research.

170329 Gender as variable

Pre-print of the EACL paper also appears on the previous post.

I welcome your thoughts.

-Brian

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