Print Email Facebook Twitter The Social Impact of Natural Language Processing Title The Social Impact of Natural Language Processing Author Spruit, S. (TU Delft Organisation & Governance) Hovy, Dirk Date 2016 Abstract Medical sciences have long since established an ethics code for experiments, to minimize the risk of harm to subjects. Natural language processing (NLP) used to involve mostly anonymous corpora, with the goal of enriching linguistic analysis, and was therefore unlikely to raise ethical concerns. As NLP becomes increasingly wide-spread and uses more data from social media, however, the situation has changed: the outcome of NLP experiments and applications can now have a direct effect on individual users’ lives. Until now, the discourse on this topic in the field has not followed the technological development, while public discourse was often focused on exaggerated dangers. This position paper tries to take back the initiative and start a discussion. We identify a number of social implications of NLP and discuss their ethical significance, as well as ways to address them. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:92040b36-c772-4c75-b37b-debb089bb019 Source Proceedings of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 591-598 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2016 S. Spruit, Dirk Hovy Files PDF The_Social_Impact_of_Natu ... essing.pdf 209.18 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:92040b36-c772-4c75-b37b-debb089bb019/datastream/OBJ/view