# Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP: Hands-on strategies for students and researchers

Luciana Benotti, Fanny Ducel, Karën Fort, Guido Ivetta, Zhijing Jin, Min-Yen Kan, Seunghun J. Lee, Minzhi Li, Margot Mieskes, Adriana Pagano

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## To cite this version:

Luciana Benotti, Fanny Ducel, Karën Fort, Guido Ivetta, Zhijing Jin, et al. Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP: Hands-on strategies for students and researchers. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Tutorial Abstracts), 2025, 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-tutorials.5. [hal-05457524](https://hal-inriaHalId:hal-05457524)

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https://inria.hal.science/hal-05457524v1

Submitted on 14 Jan 2026

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# Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP: Hands-on strategies for students and researchers

Luciana Benotti, Fanny Ducel, Karën Fort, Guido Ivetta, Zhijing Jin, Min-Yen Kan, Seunghun J. Lee, Margot Mieskes, Minzhi Li, and Adriana Pagano

Website: https://ethics.aclweb.org/tutorials/ACL-2025/

With NLP research being rapidly productionized into real-world applications, it is important to be aware of and think through the consequences of our work. Such ethical considerations are important in both authoring and reviewing (e.g. privacy, consent, fairness, among others).

This tutorial will equip participants with basic guidelines for thinking deeply about ethical issues and review common considerations that recur in NLP research. The methodology is interactive and participatory, including discussion of case studies and group work. Participants will gain practical experience on when to flag a paper for ethics review and how to write an ethical consideration section to be shared with the broader community. Most importantly, the participants will be co-creating the tutorial outcomes and extending tutorial materials to share as public outcomes.

**Luciana Benotti**, Associate Professor, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Email: luciana.benotti@unc.edu.ar

Website: https://benotti.github.io/

Luciana Benotti is an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. Her research interests include situated and grounded language, especially the study of misunderstandings, bias, stereotypes, and clarification requests. She is a co-chair of the ACL ethics committee.

**Fanny Ducel**, PhD Candidate, Université Paris-Saclay

Email: fanny.ducel@universite-paris-saclay.fr

Website: https://fannyducel.github.io/

Fanny Ducel is a PhD candidate at the Université Paris-Saclay, France. She works on stereotypical biases in LLMs. She also teaches ethics to international NLP graduates.

**Karën Fort**, Professor, Université de Lorraine

Email: karen.fort@loria.fr

Website: https://members.loria.fr/KFort/

Karën Fort is a Professor at the Université de Lorraine, France. She has been working on ethics and teaching ethics in NLP since 2014. She was co-chair of the first two ethics committees in the field, in 2020 and 2021, and is co-chair of the ACL ethics committee.

**Guido Ivetta**, PhD Candidate, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Email: guidoivetta@unc.edu.ar

Website: https://guidoivetta.github.io/

Guido Ivetta is a PhD candidate at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. His work focuses on language model calibration and biases. He teaches AI ethics to K-12 teachers.

**Zhijing Jin**, Incoming Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

Email: zjin@cs.toronto.edu

Website: https://zhijing-jin.com/

Zhijing Jin is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and currently a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Her research focuses on Causality for NLP
and NLP for Social Good. She has co-organized many workshops (e.g., several NLP for Positive Impact Workshops at ACL and EMNLP, and Causal Representation Learning Workshop at NeurIPS 2024), and also the ACL Year-Round Mentorship since 2021.

**Min-Yen Kan**, Associate Professor, National University of Singapore

Email: kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg

Website: https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/kanmy/

Min-Yen Kan is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and a co-chair of the ACL ethics committee. He was a previous member of the ACL executive committee, the inaugural Information Officer, and a previous ACL Anthology Director.

**Seunghun J. Lee**, Senior Associate Professor, International Christian University

Email: seunghun@icu.ac.jp

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/seunghunjlee/home

Seunghun J. Lee is a Senior Associate Professor of Linguistics at the International Christian University, a liberal arts college in Tokyo, Japan. He is also an Adjunct Professor of African Languages at the University of Venda in South Africa, and an Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in India.

**Minzhi Li**, PhD Candidate, National University of Singapore

Email: li.minzhi@u.nus.edu

Website: https://yocodeyo.github.io/

Minzhi Li is a PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore. Her main research interest is socially aware NLP.

**Margot Mieskes**, Professor, University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt

Email: margot.mieskes@h-da.de

Website: https://sis.h-da.de/personen/professor-innen-auf-einen-blick/prof-dr-margot-mieskes

Margot Mieskes is a Professor for Information Science at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany. She works in Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on automatic summarization, evaluation methods, data quality, emotion detection, ethics, experiment reproducibility, and biases in large language models.

**Adriana Pagano**, Full Professor, Federal University of Minas Gerais

Email: apagano@ufmg.br

Website: https://scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=iMOX_EQAAAAJ

Adriana Pagano is a Full Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where she supervises MA and PhD students in Applied and Computational Linguistics. She is a Research Fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the Minas Gerais State Agency for Research and Development (FAPEMIG), pursuing studies on multilingual text production and modeling. She is currently leading an international interdisciplinary project on benchmarking LLMs for Responsible AI. She is a member of the Ethics Committee for AI at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.