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ACL 2025 Ethics Tutorial: Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP

Luciana Benotti Fanny Ducel Karën Fort Guido Ivetta Zhijing Jin Min-Yen Kan Seunghun J. Lee Minzhi Li Margot Mieskes Punya Syon Pandey Adriana Pagano Alvin Grissom II

Materials for the ACL 2025 Ethics Tutorial: Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP: Hands-on strategies for students and researchers.

This repository archives the materials in a reusable form, related materials (ACL Stakeholder Survey) and also links to other contemporary resources. If you see things missing or needing maintenance, please file an issue or a pull request.

Authors:

Additional Contributors:

How to run your own tutorial or lesson?

We recommend using our base materials here and adapting them to your setting. Minimally, you need to create your own shortlinks and URL codes to your version of the materials before running, as the archived materials reference our ACL 2025 or EACL 2023 instances.

For our tutorial setting in an audience participatory style and approximately 20+ participants and 4 organisers, it was important to:

  • Restrict the number of groups so that each group can present within the session's time limit;

  • Designate a particular organiser to facilitate virtual participants;

  • Have live edit access to online documents, to allow participant leads to note-take and present.

Other formats might consider:

  • Lecture only: use and adapt the lecture materials from the first and seventh segments of the tutorial.

  • Experiential only: use and adapt Segments 2–6, which asks participants to read and critique abstracts that bring up common ethical issues in our community.

  • Student (Homework) Assignment: curate sources from the accompanying Ethics Reading List that the committee maintains, and ask participants to read and write their reflections on.

If you run a course, tutorial or other session based on these materials, we'd love to hear from you! Please get in contact with us, and we may also (with your permission) list your course or materials in the Resource segment. Also please do cite our tutorial abstract as a means of acknowledging the helpfulness of the materials. Thank you!

@inproceedings{benotti-etal-2025-navigating,
    title = "Navigating Ethical Challenges in {NLP}: Hands-on strategies for students and researchers",
    author = {Benotti, Luciana  and
      Ducel, Fanny  and
      Fort, Kar{\"e}n  and
      Ivetta, Guido  and
      Jin, Zhijing  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Lee, Seunghun J.  and
      Li, Minzhi  and
      Mieskes, Margot  and
      Pagano, Adriana},
    editor = "Arase, Yuki  and
      Jurgens, David  and
      Xia, Fei",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Tutorial Abstracts)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-tutorials.5/",
    pages = "7--8",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-255-8",
    abstract = "With NLP research being rapidly productionized into real-world applications, it is important to be aware of and think through the consequences of our work. Such ethical considerations are important in both authoring and reviewing (e.g. privacy, consent, fairness, among others). This tutorial will equip participants with basic guidelines for thinking deeply about ethical issues and review common considerations that recur in NLP research. The methodology is interactive and participatory, including discussion of case studies and group work. Participants will gain practical experience on when to flag a paper for ethics review and how to write an ethical consideration section to be shared with the broader community. Most importantly, the participants will be co-creating the tutorial outcomes and extending tutorial materials to share as public outcomes."
}

Table of Contents

(these are internal links to the sections below)

Introduction

In 2024, the ACL Ethics Committee (AEC) decided to propose to run a tutorial on ethics and its impact on ethics in both authoring and reviewing aspects for the community of CL/NLP scholars and practitioners. As part of this process, the AEC Committee put together the proposal file and submitted it to the joint call for tutorial proposals. It is currently published in the ACL Anthology.

The tutorial was accepted to run at ACL 2025 (Vienna, Austria, 27 July to 1 August) on Sundey, 27 July from 14:00 to 17:30hs in Hall M.1-M.2 at the venue. The tutorial will be hybrid and we will have online moderators for the virtual participants.

The tutorial and its materials will be presented in English. It will be structured as per the proposal, in seven segments, each approximately 30 minutes long. It is participatory in nature, requiring the audience to work in groups on invented problematic abstracts written by the proposers that represent common ethical issues experienced by ethics review chairs. There will be a good facilitator-to-group ratio, to ensure all of the participants have a chance to reflect, contribute and be heard, and for the facilitators to keep the session on track.

ACL 2025 Tutorial Group Activity

We conducted the tutorial in an active classroom style, where participants were self-organized into small groups (in our instance, 2 groups of about 10 participants each), electing leads for subsequent group presentation and worked through the exercises to record their reactions to the materials and identify the issues and conducive outcomes.

Tutorial Slides

Google Slides permalink for ACL 2025 tutorial: https://tinyurl.com/presentation-deck-ACL-2025

Individual Slides PDFs:

Tutorial Recording

Activity

The hands-on activity in the tutorial starts with a 5-minute introduction of the activity and a short review of the individual abstracts, which are also described in the slides. Participants were grouped into random groups, which had to elect a scribe and a presenter. The scribe serves as a secretariat for typing in the notes from their group; and the presenter is delegated as the person in the group to present the findings to the entire tutorial audience. Each group was assigned one of the abstracts to read and critique.

The critique of the abstracts is run in two phases. In the first phase, groups discuss first to prepare a single slide for silent sharing with other groups (Segment 2). In this second phase (Segment 4), the groups could enlarge their thinking by reflecting on either additional abstracts, the single shared slide from each group, or both.

After both phases were finished, each group presented elements of their findings, with the faciltators structuring and probing for issues and clarity on different aspects.

Materials

The activity was run using a scribe document where the organizers communicated information (the abstracts below and the instructions) and solicited the audience's feedback on the overall session.

However, for the group activities, we used an editable online presentation deck such that each group could create 1-3 slides (1 slide max in the first phease) in their respective subgroups.

We provide 9 abstracts below with a gloss of their topical concern. The first 6 were written for EACL 2023, but only the first three were ran, due to the smaller number of participants.

  1. Facial Recognition
  2. Social Media Dataset Collection
  3. Cost-prohibitive Language Models
  4. Language Resource Collection from Protected Groups
  5. Multilingual Sentiment and Crowdsourced Annotation
  6. Large language model use in healthcare
  7. Autism, LLMs and Risks of Overclaiming
  8. Human Experiments on LLM-generated Medical Myths
  9. LLM Attacks for Stereotypes

Resources

Here is a list of faculty courses (by our presenters, certainly there are more out there) that have also taught similar topics. For expediency we list them directly here:

All materials in this repo are CC-BY-4.0

Our presenters would also like to thank the entire ACL Ethics Committee (AEC) for their support and endorsement of the process.