Taxonomizing Representational Harms using Speech Act Theory
Open accessAbstract
Emily Corvi, Hannah Washington, Stefanie Reed, Chad Atalla, Alexandra Chouldechova, P. Alex Dow, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Nicholas J Pangakis, Emily Sheng, Dan Vann, Matthew Vogel, Hanna Wallach. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. 2025.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Existing research predominantly focuses on understanding, defining or evaluating representational 'harms' and often uses poor AI-generated images to elicit feedback from marginalized communities.
“Our approach to defining and evaluating 'good' representation differs from existing research that predominantly focuses on understanding, defining or evaluating representational 'harms' [24, 28, 38, 44, 67, 77, 91, 116] and often uses poor AI-generated images to elicit feedback from marginalized communities (e.g., [65, 77, 79]).”
From Engaging Communities Meaningfully in Defining Disability Representation for AI Image Generation (2026) · cites this paper as [28]
The Introduction and Conclusion show that this paper defines and examines representational harms, supporting the first part of the attribution. The Limitations section says it focuses on language generation rather than images; the cited paper does not support the claim that it uses poor AI-generated images to elicit feedback from marginalized communities. (LLM, conf=0.90)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 82
- Gavin Abercrombie, Djalel Benbouzid, Paolo Giudici, Delaram Golpayegani, Julio Hernandez, Pierre Noro, Harshvardhan Pandit, Eva Paraschou, Charlie Pow- nall, Jyoti Prajapati, Mark A. Sayre, Ushnish Sen- gupta, Arthit Suriyawongkul, Ruby Thelot, Sofia Vei, and Laura Waltersdorfer. 2024. A collabora- tive, human-centred taxonomy of AI, algorithmic, and automation harms. arXiv:2407.01294. Version · arXiv
- Gavin Abercrombie, Amanda Cercas Curry, Tanvi Dinkar, and Zeerak Talat. 2023. Mirages: On an- thropomorphism in dialogue systems. In Proceed- ings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4776-4790, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguis- tics. · DOI · Paper page
- Robert Adcock and David Collier. 2001. Measurement validity: A shared standard for qualitative and quanti- tative research. American Political Science Review, 93(3):529-546.
- Asif Agha. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Lan- guage & Communication, 23(3-4):231-273.
- Asif Agha. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Jour- nal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1):38-59. · DOI
- Asif Agha. 2010. Recycling mediatized personae across participation frameworks. Pragmatics and Society, 1(2):311-319.
- Cameron Anderson and Courtney E. Brown. 2010. The functions and dysfunctions of hierarchy. Research in Organizational Behavior, 30:55-89. · DOI · Paper page
- J.L. Austin. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Har- vard University Press.
- Michele Banko, Brendon MacKeen, and Laurie Ray. 2020. A unified taxonomy of harmful content. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms, pages 125-137. Association for Compu- tational Linguistics. · DOI
- Solon Barocas, Kate Crawford, Aaron Shapiro, and Hanna Wallach. 2017. The problem with bias: Al- locative versus representational harms in machine learning. In Proceedings of SIGCIS, Philadelphia, PA.
- Solon Barocas and Andrew D Selbst. 2016. Big data's disparate impact. In 104 California Law Review 671. SSRN eLibrary.
- Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan- Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pages 610-623. · DOI · Paper page
- Emily M. Bender and Alexander Koller. 2020. Climbing towards NLU: On meaning, form, and understanding in the age of data. In Proceedings of the 58th An- nual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5185-5198. · DOI · Paper page
- Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan. 1989. Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text -Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 9:93-124. · DOI · Paper page
- Betty J. Birner. 2013. Introduction to Pragmatics. Wiley-Blackwell.
- Su Lin Blodgett. 2021. Sociolinguistically Driven Approaches for Just Natural Language Processing. · DOI
- Su Lin Blodgett, Solon Barocas, Hal Daumé III, and Hanna Wallach. 2020. Language (technology) is power: A critical survey of "bias" in NLP. In Pro- ceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Associa- tion for Computational Linguistics, pages 5454-5476. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Su Lin Blodgett, Gilsinia Lopez, Alexandra Olteanu, Robert Sim, and Hanna Wallach. 2021. Stereotyp- ing Norwegian salmon: An inventory of pitfalls in fairness benchmark datasets. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Compu- tational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Vol- ume 1: Long Papers), pages 1004-1015. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Jan Blommaert and Piia Varis. 2015a. Culture as ac- cent: The cultural logic of hijabistas. Semiotica, 2015(203):153-177. · DOI
- Pierre Bourdieu. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
- Mary Bucholtz. 1998. Geek the girl: Language, femi- ninity, and female nerds. In Gender and Belief Sys- tems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference, Berkeley Women and Lan- guage Group, pages 119-131.
- Mary Bucholtz. 2003. Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguis- tics, 7(3):398-416. · DOI · Paper page
- Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and in- teraction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Dis- course Studies, pages 585-614.
- Michael Castelle. 2018. The linguistic ideologies of deep abusive language classification. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Abusive Language Online (ALW2), pages 160-170. Association for Computa- tional Linguistics. · DOI
- Jennifer Chien and David Danks. 2024. Beyond behav- iorist representational harms: A plan for measure- ment and mitigation. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT '24, pages 933-946, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. · DOI · Paper page
- Alexandra Chouldechova. 2017. Fair prediction with disparate impact: A study of bias in recidivism pre- diction instruments. Big data, 5(2):153-163.
- Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan. 1991. Ground- ing in communication. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, and S. D. Teasley, editors, Perspectives on socially shared cognition, pages 127-149. American Psycho- logical Association. · DOI · Paper page
- Robert W Connell and James W Messerschmidt. 2005. Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19(6):829-859.
- Kate Crawford. 2017. The trouble with bias. In Con- ference on Neural Information Processing Systems (invited speaker).
- Kimberlé Crenshaw. 1991. Mapping the margins: In- tersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6):1241- 1299.
- Adam Croom. 2013. How to do things with slurs: Stud- ies in the way of derogatory words. Language & Communication, 33:177-204. · DOI
- Sunipa Dev, Emily Sheng, Jieyu Zhao, Aubrie Amstutz, Jiao Sun, Yu Hou, Mattie Sanseverino, Jiin Kim, Ak- ihiro Nishi, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang. 2022. On measures of biases and harms in NLP. In Find- ings of the Association for Computational Linguis- tics: AACL-IJCNLP 2022, pages 246-267, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Nathalie Diberardino, Clair Baleshta, and Luke Stark. 2024. Algorithmic harms and algorithmic wrongs. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fair- ness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT '24, pages 1725-1732, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. · DOI
- Penelope Eckert. 1989. Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. Teachers College Press.
- Penelope Eckert. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of sociolinguistics, 12(4):453-476. · DOI · Paper page
- Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2007. Putting communities of practice in their place. Gen- der & Language, 1(1):27-37. · DOI
- Eve Fleisig, Aubrie Amstutz, Chad Atalla, Su Lin Blodgett, Hal Daumé III, Alexandra Olteanu, Emily Sheng, Dan Vann, and Hanna Wallach. 2023. Fair- Prism: Evaluating fairness-related harms in text gen- eration. In ACL 2023, pages 6231--6251.
- Ori Freiman and Boaz Miller. 2019. Can artificial en- tities assert? In The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press.
- Daniel Fried, Nicholas Tomlin, Jennifer Hu, Roma Pa- tel, and Aida Nematzadeh. 2023. Pragmatics in lan- guage grounding: Phenomena, tasks, and modeling approaches. In Findings of the Association for Com- putational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 12619- -12640.
- Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine. 1995. The boundaries of languages and disciplines: how ideologies construct difference. Social Research, 62(4):967-1001.
- Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske. 1996. The ambiva- lent sexism inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3):491-512.
- Noah D Goodman and Michael C Frank. 2016. Prag- matic language interpretation as probabilistic infer- ence. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20(11):818-829.
- Antonio Gramsci. 1971. Prison Notebooks. Columbia University Press.
- H Paul Grice. 1969. Utterer's meaning and intention. The Philosophical Review, 78(2):147-177.
- H Paul Grice. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan, editors, Syntax and semantics, vol- ume 3, pages 41-58. Academic Press.
- H Paul Grice. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Har- vard University Press.
- Daniel W. Harris and Rachel McKinney. 2021. Speech- act theory: Social and political applications. In The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philoso- phy of Language, pages 70-90. Routledge.
- Thomas Hartvigsen, Saadia Gabriel, Hamid Palangi, Maarten Sap, Dipankar Ray, and Ece Kamar. 2022. Toxigen: A large-scale machine-generated dataset for adversarial and implicit hate speech detection. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3309-3326, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Dick Hebdige. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge, London.
- Jon Henner. 2024. How to train your abled linguist: A crip linguistics perspective on pragmatic research. In Mary Bucholtz Anne H. Charity Hudley, Chris- tine Mallison, editor, Inclusion in Linguistics, chap- ter 1, pages 21-36. Oxford University Press.
- Jon Henner and Octavian Robinson. 2023. Unsettling languages, unruly bodyminds: Imaging a crip linguis- tics. Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability, 1(1):7-37. · DOI
- Jane H Hill. 1998. Language, race, and white public space. American Anthropologist, 100(3):680-689. · DOI · Paper page
- Gordon Hodson and Elvira Prusaczyk. 2021. Cavalier humor beliefs: Dismissing jokes as 'just jokes' fa- cilitates prejudice and internalizes negativity among targets. In The Social Psychology of Humor, pages 170-188. Routledge. · DOI
- Yan Huang. 2014. Pragmatics, second edition. Oxford University Press.
- Ben Hutchinson and Margaret Mitchell. 2019. 50 years of test (un)fairness: Lessons in machine learning. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Account- ability, and Transparency, pages 49-58. · DOI · Paper page
- Wiebke Hutiri, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, and Alice Xiang. 2024. Not my voice! A taxonomy of ethi- cal and safety harms of speech generators. In Pro- ceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT '24, page 359-376, New York, NY, USA. Association for Com- puting Machinery. · DOI
- Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideol- ogy and linguistic differentiation. In Regimes of lan- guage: Ideologies, polities, and identities, pages 35- 84. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
- Barbara Johnstone, Jennifer Andrus, and Andrew E Danielson. 2006. Mobility, indexicality, and the en- registerment of "Pittsburghese". Journal of English Linguistics, 34(2):77-104. · DOI
- Andreas H. Jucker. 2024. Speech Acts: Discursive, Multimodal, Diachronic. Cambridge Elements: Ele- ments in Pragmatics.
- Atoosa Kasirzadeh and Iason Gabriel. 2023. In conver- sation with artificial intelligence: Aligning language models with human values. In Philosophy and Tech- nology. · DOI · Paper page
- Jared Katzman, Angelina Wang, Morgan Scheuerman, Su Lin Blodgett, Kristen Laird, Hanna Wallach, and Solon Barocas. 2023. Taxonomizing and measuring representational harms: A look at image tagging. In Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelli- gence (AAAI 2023), volume 36, pages 14277-14285. · DOI · Paper page
- Scott F. Kiesling. 2011. The interactional construction of desire as gender. Gender and Language, 5(2):213- 239. · DOI
- Kamilla Kraft and Janus Mortensen. 2023. Norms and stereotypes: Studying the emergence and sedimenta- tion of social meaning. In Norms and the Study of Language in Social Life, pages 97-125.
- William Labov. 1972. Academic ignorance and black intelligence. Atlantic Monthly, pages 59-67.
- Emily Ladau. 2021. Demystifying disability: What to know, what to say, and how to be an ally. Ten Speed Press.
- Michelle Seng Ah Lee and Luciano Floridi. 2021. Algo- rithmic fairness in mortgage lending: from absolute conditions to relational trade-offs. Minds and Ma- chines, 31(1):165-191. · DOI · Paper page
- Chang Liu. 2021. Slurs as illocutionary force indicators. Philosophia, 49:1051-1065. · DOI
- Daniele Lorenzini. 2020. From recognition to acknowl- edgement: rethinking the perlocutionary. Inquiry, pages 1-20. · DOI
- Mary Kate McGowan. 2019. Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm. Oxford University Press. · DOI
- Moin Nadeem, Anna Bethke, and Siva Reddy. 2021. StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Lin- guistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5356-5371, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Nikita Nangia, Clara Vania, Rasika Bhalerao, and Samuel R. Bowman. 2020. CrowS-pairs: A chal- lenge dataset for measuring social biases in masked language models. In Proceedings of the 2020 Con- ference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 1953-1967, Online. As- sociation for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Stephen Neale. 1992. Paul grice and the philosophy of language. Linguistics and Philosophy, 15(5):509- 559.
- Elinor Ochs. 1992. Indexing gender. In Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, editors, Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, pages 335--358. Cambridge University Press.
- Anaelia Ovalle, Arjun Subramonian, Vagrant Gautam, Gilbert Gee, and Kai-Wei Chang. 2023. Factoring the matrix of domination: A critical review and reimagi- nation of intersectionality in AI fairness. In Proceed- ings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, AIES '23, pages 496-511, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. · DOI
- David Pautler and Alex Quilici. 1998. A computational model of social perlocutions. In COLING 1998 Vol- ume 2: The 17th International Conference on Com- putational Linguistics, pages 1020-1026.
- Mihaela Popa-Wyatt. 2020. Reclamation: Taking back control of words. Grazer Philosophische Studien, (1):159-176. · DOI
- Angela Reyes. 2004. Asian American stereotypes as circulating resource. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publi- cation of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 14(2-3):173-192.
- John R. Rickford. 2000. Linguistics, education, and the Ebonics firestorm. In Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, pages 25-45.
- Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores. 2017. Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5):621-647.
- H Samy Alim and Angela Reyes. 2011. Introduction: Complicating race: Articulating race across multiple social dimensions. Discourse & Society, 22(4):379- 384. · DOI
- Maarten Sap, Saadia Gabriel, Lianhui Qin, Dan Juraf- sky, Noah A. Smith, and Yejin Choi. 2020. Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about social and power im- plications of language. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5477-5490, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI
- Marina Sbisà. 2013. Locution, illocution, perlocution. In Pragmatics of Speech Actions, pages 25-75. De Gruyter.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Engaging Communities Meaningfully in Defining Disability Representation for AI Image Generation
Thieme, A., Faia Marques, R., Grayson, M., Balachandar, S., Tyler Cassidy, C., Choksi, M. Z., Longden, C., Huda, R. S., Ileve Kalovwe, N., Mallon, C., et al. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790768 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
- Authors
- Corvi, E., Washington, H., Reed, S., Atalla, C., Chouldechova, A., Dow, P. A., Garcia-Gathright, J., Pangakis, N. J., Sheng, E., Vann, D., Vogel, M., & Wallach, H.
- Affiliations
- Microsoft (United States) (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
- Published
- 2025
- Pages
- 3907-3932
- OpenAlex
- W4412888682
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 1
- FWCI
- 6.09
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (Findings of ACL) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Keywords
- representational harm, speech act theory, algorithmic harms, AI-generated text
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review