Ethical Concern Identification in NLP: A Corpus of ACL Anthology Ethics Statements

TL;DR

This paper introduces EthiCon, a new corpus of ethical concern statements from NLP research papers, and explores automated identification, comparison with public and professional concerns, and gaps in existing taxonomies.

Contribution

The creation of EthiCon, a large annotated corpus of ethical concerns in NLP research, and analysis of automated concern detection and taxonomy gaps.

Findings

Promising results in automating ethical concern identification

Differences between research concerns and public/professional concerns

Identification of gaps in existing ethical taxonomies

Abstract

What ethical concerns, if any, do LLM researchers have? We introduce EthiCon, a corpus of 1,580 ethical concern statements extracted from scientific papers published in the ACL Anthology. We extract ethical concern keywords from the statements and show promising results in automating the concern identification process. Through a survey, we compare the ethical concerns of the corpus to the concerns listed by the general public and professionals in the field. Finally, we compare our retrieved ethical concerns with existing taxonomies pointing to gaps and future research directions.