Gender as a Variable in Natural-Language Processing: Ethical Considerations

Brian Larson


Abstract
Researchers and practitioners in natural-language processing (NLP) and related fields should attend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results. This paper discusses theoretical and ethical frameworks 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.
Anthology ID:
W17-1601
Volume:
Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Dirk Hovy, Shannon Spruit, Margaret Mitchell, Emily M. Bender, Michael Strube, Hanna Wallach
Venue:
EthNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1601
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-1601
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Brian Larson. 2017. Gender as a Variable in Natural-Language Processing: Ethical Considerations. In Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing, pages 1–11, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gender as a Variable in Natural-Language Processing: Ethical Considerations (Larson, EthNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1601.pdf