Shannon L. Spruit

Also published as: Shannon Spruit


2022

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SafetyKit: First Aid for Measuring Safety in Open-domain Conversational Systems
Emily Dinan | Gavin Abercrombie | A. Bergman | Shannon Spruit | Dirk Hovy | Y-Lan Boureau | Verena Rieser
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The social impact of natural language processing and its applications has received increasing attention. In this position paper, we focus on the problem of safety for end-to-end conversational AI. We survey the problem landscape therein, introducing a taxonomy of three observed phenomena: the Instigator, Yea-Sayer, and Impostor effects. We then empirically assess the extent to which current tools can measure these effects and current systems display them. We release these tools as part of a “first aid kit” (SafetyKit) to quickly assess apparent safety concerns. Our results show that, while current tools are able to provide an estimate of the relative safety of systems in various settings, they still have several shortcomings. We suggest several future directions and discuss ethical considerations.

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Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design
A. Stevie Bergman | Gavin Abercrombie | Shannon Spruit | Dirk Hovy | Emily Dinan | Y-Lan Boureau | Verena Rieser
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Over the last several years, end-to-end neural conversational agents have vastly improved their ability to carry unrestricted, open-domain conversations with humans. However, these models are often trained on large datasets from the Internet and, as a result, may learn undesirable behaviours from this data, such as toxic or otherwise harmful language. Thus, researchers must wrestle with how and when to release these models. In this paper, we survey recent and related work to highlight tensions between values, potential positive impact, and potential harms. We also provide a framework to support practitioners in deciding whether and how to release these models, following the tenets of value-sensitive design.

2017

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Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing
Dirk Hovy | Shannon Spruit | Margaret Mitchell | Emily M. Bender | Michael Strube | Hanna Wallach
Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing

2016

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The Social Impact of Natural Language Processing
Dirk Hovy | Shannon L. Spruit
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)