Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?
The social impact of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly
important, with a rising community focus on initiatives related to NLP for
Social Good (NLP4SG). Indeed, in recent years, almost 20% of all papers in the
ACL Anthology address topics related to social good as defined by the UN
Sustainable Development Goals (Adauto et al., 2023). In this study, we take an
author- and venue-level perspective to map the landscape of NLP4SG, quantifying
the proportion of work addressing social good concerns both within and beyond
the ACL community, by both core ACL contributors and non-ACL authors. With this
approach we discover two surprising facts about the landscape of NLP4SG. First,
ACL authors are dramatically more likely to do work addressing social good
concerns when publishing in venues outside of ACL. Second, the vast majority of
publications using NLP techniques to address concerns of social good are done
by non-ACL authors in venues outside of ACL. We discuss the implications of
these findings on agenda-setting considerations for the ACL community related
to NLP4SG.
68e478b7e4e093a7044e4cfc
Grace LeFevre
68e478b7e4e093a7044e4cfd
Qingcheng Zeng
68e478b7e4e093a7044e4cfe
Adam Leif
68e478b7e4e093a7044e4cff
Jason Jewell
68e478b7e4e093a7044e4d00
Denis Peskoff
68e478b7e4e093a7044e4d01
Rob Voigt
Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?
The social impact of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly
important, with a rising community focus on initiatives related to NLP for
Social Good (NLP4SG). Indeed, in recent years, almost 20% of all papers in the
ACL Anthology address topics related to social good as defined by the UN
Sustainable Development Goals (Adauto et al., 2023). In this study, we take an
author- and venue-level perspective to map the landscape of NLP4SG, quantifying
the proportion of work addressing social good concerns both within and beyond
the ACL community, by both core ACL contributors and non-ACL authors. With this
approach we discover two surprising facts about the landscape of NLP4SG. First,
ACL authors are dramatically more likely to do work addressing social good
concerns when publishing in venues outside of ACL. Second, the vast majority of
publications using NLP techniques to address concerns of social good are done
by non-ACL authors in venues outside of ACL. We discuss the implications of
these findings on agenda-setting considerations for the ACL community related
to NLP4SG.
The study reveals that ACL authors are more likely to address social good concerns in non-ACL venues, and most NLP4SG publications are from non-ACL authors.
Natural Language Processing NLP for Social Good NLP4SG ACL Anthology UN Sustainable Development Goals author-level perspective venue-level perspective core ACL contributors non-ACL authors agenda-setting considerations