Ethics for NLP 25

Artificial intelligence and natural language processing are a part of our everyday life. The decisions that we make when building and using NLP-based applications can impact the world and society -- for better or worse. In this course we discuss the ethics of NLP research, from theoretical foundations (what is ethics? what is fairness? what is privacy?) to real-world, state-of-the-art NLP and AI applications that can do both a lot of good, and a lot of harm.

We cover topics such as:

  • Foundations and history of ethics and NLP
  • Bias: building fair NLP applications in an unfair world
  • Privacy: data ownership and responsible data handling in NLP and AI
  • Safety: benefits and dangers of state-of-the-art AI systems and LLMs
  • Social good: using NLP to help emergency response, fight discrimination and make the technology benefit people who need it most.