Gender as a Variable in Natural-Language Processing: Ethical Considerations
Open accessAbstract
Researchers and practitioners in naturallanguage processing (NLP) and related fields should attend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results.This paper discusses theoretical and ethical frameworks for using gender as a variable in NLP studies and proposes four guidelines for researchers and practitioners.The principles outlined here should guide practitioners, researchers, and peer reviewers, and they may be applicable to other social categories, such as race, applied to human beings connected to NLP research.
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The sex and gender dimension is crucial for the development of effective NLP solutions for health because multiple sex and gender differences have been documented in written and spoken language.
“The sex and gender dimension is crucial for the development of effective NLP solutions for health since multiple sex and gender differences have been documented in written and spoken language74.”
From Sex and gender differences and biases in artificial intelligence for biomedicine and healthcare (2020) · cites this paper as [74]
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References 28 · Cited by 111
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein, and Tyler Schnoe- belen. 2014. Gender identity and lexical varia- tion in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(2):135-160.
- Bryce W. Goodman. 2016. A step towards accountable algorithms? algorithmic discrimination and the eu- ropean union general data protection. In 29th Con- ference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2016), Barcelona. NIPS Foundation.
- Plato. 2005. Meno. In Plato: Meno and Other Dia- logues, pages 99-143. Oxford University Press, Ox- ford.
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. 2015. Consequentialism. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclope- dia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stan- ford University, Winter 2015 edition.
- Authors
- Larson, B.
- Affiliations
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Larson, Brian
- ORCID
- Larson, Brian
- Venue
- Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing
- Published
- 2017
- Pages
- 1-11
- OpenAlex
- W2740983644
- Cited by
- 111
- References
- 28
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 33 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 12.96
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- bepress Legal Repository (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Minnesota
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Computational and Text Analysis Methods
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Keywords
- research design, race, peer review guidelines, ethical frameworks
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