Dual use issues in the field of Natural Language Generation

TL;DR

This paper presents a survey of dual use issues in Natural Language Generation within the SIGGEN community, highlighting potential risks and ethical considerations, and serving as a resource for ongoing discussions.

Contribution

It provides the first community-specific survey on dual use issues in NLG, offering insights and a foundation for future research and policy development.

Findings

Identified key dual use concerns in NLG

Survey results highlight community awareness levels

Provides a resource for future ethical discussions

Abstract

This report documents the results of a recent survey in the SIGGEN community, focusing on Dual Use issues in Natural Language Generation (NLG). SIGGEN is the Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for researchers working on NLG. The survey was prompted by the ACL executive board, which asked all SIGs to provide an overview of dual use issues within their respective subfields. The survey was sent out in October 2024 and the results were processed in January 2025. With 23 respondents, the survey is presumably not representative of all SIGGEN members, but at least this document offers a helpful resource for future discussions. This report is open to feedback from the SIGGEN community. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!