Ethical Concern Identification in NLP: A Corpus of ACL Anthology Ethics Statements

Antonia Karamolegkou, Sandrine Schiller Hansen, Ariadni Christopoulou, Filippos Stamatiou, Anne Lauscher, Anders Søgaard

Abstract: What ethical concerns, if any, do LLM researchers have? We introduce EthiCon, a corpus of 1,580 ethical concern statements extracted from scientific papers published in the ACL Anthology. We extract ethical concern keywords from the statements and show promising results in automating the concern identification process. Through a survey (N=200), we compare the ethical concerns of the corpus to the concerns listed by the general public and professionals in the field. Finally, we compare our retrieved ethical concerns with existing taxonomies and guidelines pointing to gaps and actionable insights.