Just What do You Think You're Doing, Dave?' A Checklist for Responsible Data Use in NLP

TL;DR

This paper discusses legal and ethical principles for responsible data use in NLP, proposing a checklist to standardize peer review and promote consistent data practices across the community.

Contribution

It introduces a proposed checklist for responsible data use in NLP, aiming to standardize peer review and foster ethical data practices.

Findings

The checklist can standardize peer review processes.

It promotes ethical and legal data sharing practices.

Encourages community-wide adoption of responsible data standards.

Abstract

A key part of the NLP ethics movement is responsible use of data, but exactly what that means or how it can be best achieved remain unclear. This position paper discusses the core legal and ethical principles for collection and sharing of textual data, and the tensions between them. We propose a potential checklist for responsible data (re-)use that could both standardise the peer review of conference submissions, as well as enable a more in-depth view of published research across the community. Our proposal aims to contribute to the development of a consistent standard for data (re-)use, embraced across NLP conferences.