2022Q1 Reports: Ethics Committee Co-chairs-Draft

General

The Ethics Committee was established by the ACL on October 6, 2021 [[]], appointing a nine person team: three co-chairs, one from each major region of the ACL membership, and six members Effort was made to balance both gender and regional representation.

Since the establishment of the committee, the chairs have held their own biweekly meetings to coordinate work, and the committee as a whole has convened monthly meetings to ensure targets are met.

Efforts

The Ethics Committee has made progress on a number of internal initiatives, largely organised around delegated subcommittees to make progress. These include

• #Ethics Survey
• #Ethical Reviewing Guidelines
• #Ethics Education and Outreach
• #Committee Scope
• #Committee Procedure

Committee Scope

The responsibility and the definition of ethics is construed differently among parties. This subcommittee works towards a clearer definition of the scope and responsibilities among the AEC and other internal committees within the ACL.

The committee's current understanding is that the ACL Exec does not have a specific scope for the AEC and in some cases, also not for other subcommittees of the ACL, passing the decision of scope to the subcommittees themselves. This subcommittee thus is working towards crafting an appropriate scope for the AEC's work.

As such, the AEC decided that the scope of the committee would largely be looking towards long-term strategic goals, instead of as an operational team to handle individual ethics cases.

The subcommittee is working towards a clearer demarcation of responsibilities with respect to:

• The ACL Rolling Review (ARR): As the main source and pool of reviewers for *ACL venues, the ARR represents the key venue for fielding and distributing canonical ethical reviewing guidelines. The AEC has no direct jurisdiction over the ARR, but will seek to work together to develop a clear set of guidelines to recommend that ARR adopts. The AEC also does not operate an ethics reviewing pool, although it may serve as a repository of knowledge about who and how to recruit for ethics-based reviews. It is the AEC's hope that the ARR ethical reviewing guidelines epitomises the key decisions agreed by the AEC. We view this partnership as a key element for the AEC. The AEC membership also reflects this, as both Pascale Fung and Dirk Hovy serve in the ARR initiative (Pascale as co-chair and Dirk as Ethics review chair)
• The ACL Anthology: Ethics violations may have repercussions on the publications supported by ACL. The AEC plans to look into a workflow that builds upon current workflows for the Anthology and its interface to publication venues (e.g., conference chairs).
• The ACL Diversity and Inclusion Chair: As ethics spans many disparate viewpoints, diversity and inclusion are a key part. We are building better outreach for D&I for these purposes.
• The ACL Professional Conduct Committee (PCC): Individual member-centric problems that directly affect another individual are understood to be in the scope of the PCC. We are not yet clear Dirk Hovy is also a member of both the AEC and the PCC.

Luciana Benotti, also as NAACL executive board member, chairs this subcommittee.