Ethics Committee Chairs Metadata at CL/NLP Conferences¶
The following table provides metadata on Ethics Committee Chairs at major CL/NLP conferences, including information about their review processes, paper statistics, and documentation sources. This documentation helps future ethics chairs estimate their workload.
đŸ“‹ Are you an ethics chair? Please add your conference metadata here.
| Venue | Year | ARR? | Location | Chairs | Emails | Documentation source | Nb of papers flagged (all tracks) | Nb of papers reviewed | Conditional accept | Reject on ethical grounds | FAQ? | URL | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EMNLP | 2020 | No | Virtual | Karën Fort, Dirk Hovy | karen.fort@loria.fr dirk.hovy@unibocconi.it | Personal files (KF) | 15 | 15 | 8 | 6 | N | Ethics chairs were called for AFTER the reviewing process | |
| NAACL | 2021 | No | Mexico City, Mexico -> virtual | Karën Fort, Emily Bender | karen.fort@loria.fr ebender@uw.edu | https://2021.naacl.org/blog/ethics-review-process-report-back/ | 156 | 113 | 15 | 4 | Y | https://2021.naacl.org/ethics/faq/ | |
| ACL-IJCNLP | 2021 | Bangkok, Thailand | Xanda Schofield, Min-Yen Kan, Malvina Nissim | xanda@cs.hmc.edu kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg m.nissim@rug.nl | https://2021.aclweb.org/ethics/Ethics-FAQ/ | 247 | 195 | 28 | 0 | Y | https://2021.aclweb.org/ethics/Ethics-FAQ/ | 2 papers were recommended for rejection on ethical grounds - but both were rejected on technical grounds before the process wrapped up. While 195 papers received some kind of ethics review, 110 were found to fit in a set of common categories of issues; to help reduce reviewer workload, EACs used boilerplate review text for these common situations. A situation arose where a paper was rejected by an AC in the regular review process for ethical reasons. PCs asked EACs to weigh in, and we elected to defer to the ACs in doing so (i.e., not to set precedent that the only way papers can be rejected for ethics concerns is via the ethics review process) | |
| EMNLP | 2021 | Punta Cana, Dominican Republic | Christopher Potts, Margot Mieskes | cgpotts@stanford.edu margot.mieskes@h-da.de | https://2021.emnlp.org | 280 | 76 | 145 | 0 | Y | https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/ethics-faq | We wrote an "experience from EMNLP 2021 ethics review" document that we shared with the program chairs and others. We also shared this with Min Yen Kan and acl-ethics-chairs@inria.fr | |
| ACL | 2022 | Dublin, Ireland | Su Lin Blodgett, Christiane Fellbaum | sulin.blodgett@microsoft.com fellbaum@cs.princeton.edu | |||||||||
| EMNLP | 2022 | Abu Dhabi | Lea Frermann, Margot Mieskes | margot.mieskes@h-da.de lea.frermann@unimelb.edu.au | https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/ethics-faq (same as EMNLP 2021) | 150 | 44 | 15 | 0 | Y | https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/ethics-faq (same as EMNLP 2021) | 15 conditional accepts, and an additonal 29 accepts with specific ethics comments (but no compliance checks) | |
| NAACL | 2022 | Seattle, Washington + Online | Kai-Wei Chang, Diyi Yang, Dirk Hovy | dirk.hovy@unibocconi.it kw@kwchang.net diyiy@cs.stanford.edu | |||||||||
| COLING | 2022 | No | Gyeongju, South Korea | Nikhil Krishnaswamy, Constantine Lignos, Donia Scott | D.R.Scott@sussex.ac.uk Nikhil.Krishnaswamy@colostate.edu Constantine.Lignos@brandeis.edu | ||||||||
| ACL | 2023 | Toronto, Canada | Yonatan Bisk, Dirk Hovy | dirk.hovy@unibocconi.it ybisk@cs.cmu.edu | |||||||||
| EMNLP | 2023 | Singapore, Singapore | Kemal Oflazer, Francisco Guzman | ko@andrew.cmu.edu fguzman@fb.com | 83 | 83 | 55 | 2 | N | 1) Some papers were directly reviewed and provided ethics meta reviewers by the Ethic Chairs (typically IRB issues) 2) Some papers were withdrawn during the process 3) 13 papers were found to have no ethical issues 4) 13 were withdrawn or deskreject 5) At the end no papers ended up being rejected for ethics reasons 6) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L6t88N5n5ie_SzsC-2tyz4ooy3cqRKQmTfJA8Qua0OE/edit is the draft Reviewer form with references to relevant documentation | |||
| ACL | 2024 | Yes | Bangkok, Thailand | Aurélie Névéol, Alice Oh | aurelie.neveol@limsi.fr alice.oh@kaist.edu | 391 | 56 | 51 | 4 | N | 51 includes minor issues & major issues | ||
| EMNLP | 2024 | Yes | Miami, USA | Luciana Benotti, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Sunipa Dev | luciana.benotti@unc.edu.ar snigdha@cs.unc.edu sunipadev@google.com | We add here the ARR Ethics Guidelines * for authors: https://aclrollingreview.org/responsibleNLPresearch * for reviewers: https://aclrollingreview.org/ethicsreviewertutorial | 369 | 73 | 47 | Y | ARR prepared guidelines for flagging papers for ethics review: https://aclrollingreview.org/ethics-flagging-guidelines/ We add here the ARR Ethics Guidelines * for authors: https://aclrollingreview.org/responsibleNLPresearch * for reviewers: https://aclrollingreview.org/ethicsreviewertutorial | The ethics reviewing process is coordinated by the ARR ethics chairs Vinodkumar Prabhakaran and Malihe Alikhani in collaboration with us, the EMNLP 2024 ethics chairs | |
| NAACL | 2024 | Yes | Mexico City, Mexico | Cecilia Alm, Diana Galvan Sosa, Anjalie Field, Ameeta Agrawal, Daniel Fried, Mark Yatskar, Maria Antoniak, Alane Suhr | Cecilia.O.Alm@rit.edu dg693@cam.ac.uk anjalief@jhu.edu ameeta@cs.pdx.edu dfried@cs.cmu.edu myatskar@cis.upenn.edu mariaa@allenai.org suhr@berkeley.edu | ||||||||
| LREC-COLING | 2024 | No | Turin, Italy | Amanda Stent, Margot Mieskes, Jin-Dong Kim | margot.mieskes@h-da.de jdkim@dbcls.rois.ac.jp amanda.stent@gmail.com | ||||||||
| ACL | 2025 | Yes | Wien, Austria | Karën Fort, Björn Ross | b.ross@ed.ac.uk karen.fort@loria.fr | shared spreadsheet | 262 | 154 | 36 | 10 | N | 24 with no real issues, 68 with minor ones | |
| EACL | 2025 | Zhijing Jin |