Gender as a variable in writing studies–presentations and paper accepted

As I noted back in November, I’m presenting “Gender as a variable in writing studies: Ethics and methodology” at the Writing Research Across Borders IV conference in Bogotá, Columbia, on Thursday, February 16. While preparing for WRAB, I wrote an article that has been accepted to appear in the peer-reviewed conference proceedings of the First Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing in conjunction with the 2017 conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017), in Valencia, Spain. I’m traveling there to give that paper in early April. The article, titled “Gender as a variable in natural-language processing: Ethical considerations,” draws on similar principles as the WRAB presentation, but focuses on research in natural language processing.

Below are my slides and bibliography for the WRAB talk. Underneath that is the abstract and pre-print version for the EACL paper. (I’ll post the link to the official ACL anthology for the final paper when the proceedings are published.)

Slides for WRAB

Bibliography for WRAB

Abstract and pre-print for EACL paper

Researchers in natural-language processing (NLP) and related fields should at- tend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results. This article offers an ethical framework 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.