The Second Workshop on Ethics for Research and Teaching in Natural Language Processing

Co-located with The Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC), Luleå University of Technology.

Important information

• 2026-07-07 The Ethics4NLP workshop returns at the 2026 Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC-2026) as a half-day workshop on 25 November.

Workshop description

This workshop, the second in a series, is a continuation of the workshop with the same name, Ethics4NLP-2024, organised by the interest group in ethics for NLP, Ethics4NLP.

AI tasks involving the modelling of human language, as well as other decision-making applications (such as patient diagnosis identification and driving), have developed substantially over the last several years. In many areas, it has been claimed that AI systems learning from data alone have achieved human-like performance, and sometimes even surpassed it. However, due to the nature of these models, it is very difficult to directly inspect what they have learned. Instead, we can only observe their performance, which may be biased in one or more ways and may have broader societal and environmental implications.

As a result, developers, researchers, and teachers of language technology have identified a need to address ethical issues related to the collection of data, the training of models, and their use in real-world applications. Of particular importance are the practical and ethical appropriateness of using AI models across tasks that may affect decisions concerning individuals or groups of individuals, as well as questions of cultural representation and impact, given that most language models in use today are trained by commercial companies outside Sweden. As researchers, teachers, and students, we should equip ourselves with a deeper understanding of the impacts of such technologies and promote ethically aware research and responsible use.

The intended participants of the workshop are researchers, university teachers, Master’s and PhD students, and partners from industry and public sector from diverse backgrounds who engage with ethical questions related to the development and application of language technology, as well as related fields such as computer vision, social robotics, machine learning, philosophy, medicine, law, media, and politics. We envision an interactive workshop with time for discussion, complemented by invited talks and presentations of ongoing or completed research. Participants are invited to submit extended abstracts (and other materials) that they wish to present during the workshop.

Topics of interest

This workshop is the second in the series and builds on discussions held over several years at the Swedish Language Technology Ämnesdagar for teachers and at the Swedish Language Technology Conferences. We aim to provide a forum that brings together students, researchers, and experts to discuss topics such as:

• biases in training data,
• biases in computational models,
• personal integrity (anonymisation and pseudonymisation of data),
• intellectual property rights,
• the use of language technology tools to detect unethical language use,
• the use of language technology in under-resourced domains and communities (e.g. minority languages) and across cultures,
• legal aspects of language technology,
• philosophical questions related to AI and ethics,
• and others.

The purpose of the workshop is to further discuss these topics from a research perspective and strengthen connections with the teaching of language technology at Swedish universities, as well as its use in commercial companies, organisations, and society more broadly.

Contact

• Simon Dobnik
• Beáta Megyesi
• Hannah Devinney
• Maria Irena Szawerna

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You are also welcome to join our Discord which we intend to become a meeting point for sharing experiences and materials related to teaching and research in ethics for natural language processing in Sweden.