Ethics Sheet for Automatic Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive ethical considerations sheet for automatic emotion recognition and sentiment analysis, aiming to guide responsible development and deployment in affective computing.

Contribution

It synthesizes fifty ethical considerations from AI ethics and emotion recognition literature, highlighting assumptions and implications related to privacy and social impact.

Findings

Identifies key ethical issues in AER development.

Provides recommendations for responsible use.

Highlights privacy and social group concerns.

Abstract

The importance and pervasiveness of emotions in our lives makes affective computing a tremendously important and vibrant line of work. Systems for automatic emotion recognition (AER) and sentiment analysis can be facilitators of enormous progress (e.g., in improving public health and commerce) but also enablers of great harm (e.g., for suppressing dissidents and manipulating voters). Thus, it is imperative that the affective computing community actively engage with the ethical ramifications of their creations. In this paper, I have synthesized and organized information from AI Ethics and Emotion Recognition literature to present fifty ethical considerations relevant to AER. Notably, the sheet fleshes out assumptions hidden in how AER is commonly framed, and in the choices often made regarding the data, method, and evaluation. Special attention is paid to the implications of AER on privacy and social groups. Along the way, key recommendations are made for responsible AER. The objective of the sheet is to facilitate and encourage more thoughtfulness on why to automate, how to automate, and how to judge success well before the building of AER systems. Additionally, the sheet acts as a useful introductory document on emotion recognition (complementing survey articles).