ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Data Protection, Privacy and US Regulation (2022)

This paper examines the state of data protection and privacy in the United States. There is no comprehensive federal data protection or data privacy law despite bipartisan and popular support. There are several data protection bills pending in the 2022 session of the US Congress, five of which are examined in Section 2 below. Although it is not likely that any will be enacted, the growing number reflects the concerns of citizens and lawmakers about the power of big data. Recent actions against data abuses, including data breaches, litigation and settlements, are reviewed in Section 3 of this paper. These reflect the real harm caused when personal data is misused. Section 4 contains a brief US copyright law update on the fair use exemption, highlighting a recent court decision and indications of a re-thinking of the fair use analysis. In Section 5, some observations are made on the role of privacy in data protection regulation. It is argued that privacy should be considered from the start of the data collection and technology development process. Enhanced awareness of ethical issues, including privacy, through university-level data science programs will also lay the groundwork for best practices throughout the data and development cycles.
Pseudonymisation of Speech Data as an Alternative Approach to GDPR Compliance (2022)

The debate on the use of personal data in language resources usually focuses {---} and rightfully so {---} on anonymisation. However, this very same debate usually ends quickly with the conclusion that proper anonymisation would necessarily cause loss of linguistically valuable information. This paper discusses an alternative approach {---} pseudonymisation. While pseudonymisation does not solve all the problems (inasmuch as pseudonymised data are still to be regarded as personal data and therefore their processing should still comply with the GDPR principles), it does provide a significant relief, especially {---} but not only {---} for those who process personal data for research purposes. This paper describes pseudonymisation as a measure to safeguard rights and interests of data subjects under the GDPR (with a special focus on the right to be informed). It also provides a concrete example of pseudonymisation carried out within a research project at the Institute of Information Technology and Communications of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.
Categorizing legal features in a metadata-oriented task: defining the conditions of use (2022)

In recent times, more attention has been brought by the Human Language Technology (HLT) community to the legal framework for making available and reusing Language Resources (LR) and tools. Licensing is now an issue that is foreseen in most research projects and that is essential to provide legal certainty for repositories when distributing resources. Some repositories such as Zenodo or Quantum Stat do not offer the possibility to search for resources by licenses which can turn the searching for relevant resources a very complex task. Other repositories such as Hugging Face propose a search feature by license which may make it difficult to figure out what use can be made of such resources. During the European Language Grid (ELG) project, we moved a step forward to link metadata with the terms and conditions of use. In this paper, we document the process we undertook to categorize legal features of licenses listed in the SPDX license list and widely used in the HLT community as well as those licenses used within the ELG platform
About Migration Flows and Sentiment Analysis on Twitter data: Building the Bridge between Technical and Legal Approaches to Data Protection (2022)

Sentiment analysis has always been an important driver of political decisions and campaigns across all fields. Novel technologies allow automatizing analysis of sentiments on a big scale and hence provide allegedly more accurate outcomes. With user numbers in the billions and their increasingly important role in societal discussions, social media platforms become a glaring data source for these types of analysis. Due to its public availability, the relative ease of access and the sheer amount of available data, the Twitter API has become a particularly important source to researchers and data analysts alike. Despite the evident value of these data sources, the analysis of such data comes with legal, ethical and societal risks that should be taken into consideration when analysing data from Twitter. This paper describes these risks along the technical processing pipeline and proposes related mitigation measures.
Transparency and Explainability of a Machine Learning Model in the Context of Human Resource Management (2022)

We introduce how the proprietary machine learning algorithms developed by Gojob, an HR Tech company, to match candidates to a job offer are as transparent and explainable as possible to users (i.e., our recruiters) and our clients (e.g. companies looking to fill jobs). We detail how our matching algorithm (which identifies the best candidates for a job offer) controls the fairness of its outcome. We have described the steps we have taken to ensure that the decisions made by our mathematical models not only inform but improve the performance of our recruiters.
Public Interactions with Voice Assistant -- Discussion of Different One-Shot Solutions to Preserve Speaker Privacy (2022)

In recent years, the use of voice assistants has rapidly grown. Hereby, above all, the user`s speech data is stored and processed on a cloud platform, being the decisive factor for a good performance in speech processing and understanding. Although usually, they can be found in private households, a lot of business cases are also employed using voice assistants for public places, be it as an information service, a tour guide, or a booking system. As long as the systems are used in private spaces, it could be argued that the usage is voluntary and that the user itself is responsible for what is processed by the voice assistant system. When leaving the private space, the voluntary use is not the case anymore, as users may be made aware that their voice is processed in the cloud and background voices can be unintendedly recorded and processed as well. Thus, the usage of voice assistants in public environments raises a lot of privacy concerns. In this contribution, we discuss possible anonymization solutions to hide the speakers' identity, thus allowing a safe cloud processing of speech data. Thereby, we promote the public use of voice assistants.
Keynote Speech - Voice anonymization and the GDPR (2022)

Talk for the Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies, LREC 2022, Marseille, 24 June 2022
Cross-Clinic De-Identification of Swedish Electronic Health Records: Nuances and Caveats (2022)

Privacy preservation of sensitive information is one of the main concerns in clinical text mining. Due to the inherent privacy risks of handling clinical data, the clinical corpora used to create the clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) models underlying clinical de-identification systems cannot be shared. This situation implies that clinical NER models are trained and tested on data originating from the same institution since it is rarely possible to evaluate them on data belonging to a different organization. These restrictions on sharing make it very difficult to assess whether a clinical NER model has overfitted the data or if it has learned any undetected biases. This paper presents the results of the first-ever cross-institution evaluation of a Swedish de-identification system on Swedish clinical data. Alongside the encouraging results, we discuss differences and similarities across EHR naming conventions and NER tagsets.
Generating Realistic Synthetic Curricula Vitae for Machine Learning Applications under Differential Privacy (2022)

Applications involving machine learning in Human Resources (HR, the management of human talent in order to accomplish organizational goals) must respect the privacy of the individuals whose data is being used. This is a difficult aim, given the extremely personal nature of text data handled by HR departments, such as Curricula Vitae (CVs).
MAPA Project: Ready-to-Go Open-Source Datasets and Deep Learning Technology to Remove Identifying Information from Text Documents (2022)

This paper presents the outcomes of the MAPA project, a set of annotated corpora for 24 languages of the European Union and an open-source customisable toolkit able to detect and substitute sensitive information in text documents from any domain, using state-of-the art, deep learning-based named entity recognition techniques. In the context of the project, the toolkit has been developed and tested on administrative, legal and medical documents, obtaining state-of-the-art results. As a result of the project, 24 dataset packages have been released and the de-identification toolkit is available as open source.
PriPA: A Tool for Privacy-Preserving Analytics of Linguistic Data (2022)

The days of large amorphous corpora collected with armies of Web crawlers and stored indefinitely are, or should be, coming to an end. There is a wealth of hidden linguistic information that is increasingly difficult to access, hidden in personal data that would be unethical and technically challenging to collect using traditional methods such as Web crawling and mass surveillance of online discussion spaces. Advances in privacy regulations such as GDPR and changes in the public perception of privacy bring into question the problematic ethical dimension of extracting information from unaware if not unwilling participants. Modern corpora need to adapt, be focused on testing specific hypotheses, and be respectful of the privacy of the people who generated its data. Our work focuses on using a distributed participatory approach and continuous informed consent to solve these issues, by allowing participants to voluntarily contribute their own censored personal data at a granular level. We evaluate our approach in a three-pronged manner, testing the accuracy of measurement of statistical measures of language with respect to standard corpus linguistics tools, evaluating the usability of our application with a participant involvement panel, and using the tool for a case study on health communication.
Legal and Ethical Challenges in Recording Air Traffic Control Speech (2022)

In this paper the authors detail the various legal and ethical issues faced during the ATCO2 project. This project is aimed at developing tools to automatically collect and transcribe air traffic conversations, especially conversations between pilots and air controls towers. In this paper the authors will develop issues related to intellectual property, public data, privacy, and general ethics issues related to the collection of air-traffic control speech.
It is not Dance, is Data: Gearing Ethical Circulation of Intangible Cultural Heritage practices in the Digital Space (2022)

The documentation, protection and dissemination of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in the digital age pose significant theoretical, technological and legal challenges. Through a multidisciplinary lens, this paper presents new approaches for collecting, documenting, encrypting and protecting ICH-related data for more ethical circulation. Human-movement recognition technologies such as motion capture, allows for the recording, extraction and reproduction of human movement with unprecedented precision. The once indistinguishable or hard-to-trace reproduction of dance steps between their creators and unauthorized third parties becomes patent through the transmission of embodied knowledge, but in the form of data. This new battlefield prompted by digital technologies only adds to the disputes within the creative industries, in terms of authorship, ownership and commodification of body language. For the sake of this paper, we are aiming to disentangle the various layers present in the process of digitisation of the dancing body, to identify its by-products as well as the possible arising ownership rights that might entail. {\textquotedblright}Who owns what?{\textquotedblright}, the basic premise of intellectual property law, is transposed, in this case, onto the various types of data generated when intangible cultural heritage, in the form of dance, is digitised through motion capture and encrypted with blockchain technologies.
The Annohub Web Portal (2022)

We introduce the Annohub web portal, specialized on metadata for annotated language resources like corpora, lexica and linguistic terminologies. The new portal provides easy access to our previously released Annohub Linked Data set, by allowing users to explore the annotation metadata in the web browser. In addition, we added features that will allow users to contribute to Annohub by means of uploading language data, in RDF, CoNNL or XML formats, for annotation scheme and language analysis. The generated metadata is finally available for personal use, or for release in Annohub.
From ELTeC Text Collection Metadata and Named Entities to Linked-data (and Back) (2022)

In this paper we present the wikification of the ELTeC (European Literary Text Collection), developed within the COST Action {\textquotedblleft}Distant Reading for European Literary History{\textquotedblright} (CA16204). ELTeC is a multilingual corpus of novels written in the time period 1840{---}1920, built to apply distant reading methods and tools to explore the European literary history. We present the pipeline that led to the production of the linked dataset, the novels' metadata retrieval and named entity recognition, transformation, mapping and Wikidata population, followed by named entity linking and export to NIF (NLP Interchange Format). The speeding up of the process of data preparation and import to Wikidata is presented on the use case of seven sub-collections of ELTeC (English, Portuguese, French, Slovenian, German, Hungarian and Serbian). Our goal was to automate the process of preparing and importing information, so OpenRefine and QuickStatements were chosen as the best options. The paper also includes examples of SPARQL queries for retrieval of authors, novel titles, publication places and other metadata with different visualisation options as well as statistical overviews.
IMTVault: Extracting and Enriching Low-resource Language Interlinear Glossed Text from Grammatical Descriptions and Typological Survey Articles (2022)

Many NLP resources and programs focus on a handful of major languages. But there are thousands of languages with low or no resources available as structured data. This paper shows the extraction of 40k examples with interlinear morpheme translation in 280 different languages from LaTeX-based publications of the open access publisher Language Science Press. These examples are transformed into Linked Data. We use LIGT for modelling and enrich the data with Wikidata and Glottolog. The data is made available as HTML, JSON, JSON-LD and N-quads, and query facilities for humans (Elasticsearch) and machines (API) are provided.
Linking the LASLA Corpus in the LiLa Knowledge Base of Interoperable Linguistic Resources for Latin (2022)

This paper describes the process of interlinking the 130 Classical Latin texts provided by an annotated corpus developed at the LASLA laboratory with the LiLa Knowledge Base, which makes linguistic resources for Latin interoperable by following the principles of the Linked Data paradigm and making reference to classes and properties of widely adopted ontologies to model the relevant information. After introducing the overall architecture of the LiLa Knowledge Base and the LASLA corpus, the paper details the phases of the process of linking the corpus with the collection of lemmas of LiLa and presents a federated query to exemplify the added value of interoperability of LASLA`s texts with other resources for Latin.
Use Case: Romanian Language Resources in the LOD Paradigm (2022)

In this paper, we report on (i) the conversion of Romanian language resources to the Linked Open Data specifications and requirements, on (ii) their publication and (iii) interlinking with other language resources (for Romanian or for other languages). The pool of converted resources is made up of the Romanian Wordnet, the morphosyntactic and phonemic lexicon RoLEX, four treebanks, one for the general language (the Romanian Reference Treebank) and others for specialised domains (SiMoNERo for medicine, LegalNERo for the legal domain, PARSEME-Ro for verbal multiword expressions), frequency information on lemmas and tokens and word embeddings as extracted from the reference corpus for contemporary Romanian (CoRoLa) and a bi-modal (text and speech) corpus. We also present the limitations coming from the representation of the resources in Linked Data format. The metadata of LOD resources have been published in the LOD Cloud. The resources are available for download on our website and a SPARQL endpoint is also available for querying them.
Fuzzy Lemon: Making Lexical Semantic Relations More Juicy (2022)

The OntoLex-Lemon model provides a vocabulary to enrich ontologies with linguistic information that can be exploited by Natural Language Processing applications. The increasing uptake of Lemon illustrates the growing interest in combining linguistic information and Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we present Fuzzy Lemon, an extension of Lemon that allows to assign an uncertainty degree to lexical semantic relations. Our approach is based on an OWL ontology that defines a hierarchy of data properties encoding different types of uncertainty. We also illustrate the usefulness of Fuzzy Lemon by showing that it can be used to represent the confidence degrees of automatically discovered translations between pairs of bilingual dictionaries from the Apertium family.
A Cheap and Dirty Cross-Lingual Linking Service in the Cloud (2022)

In this paper, we describe the application of Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) technology for dynamic cross-lingual querying on demand. Whereas most related research is focusing on providing a static linking, i.e., cross-lingual inference, and then storing the resulting links, we demonstrate the application of the federation capabilities of SPARQL to perform lexical linking on the fly. In the end, we provide a baseline functionality that uses the connection of two web services {--} a SPARQL end point for multilingual lexical data and another SPARQL end point for querying an English language knowledge graph {--} in order to perform querying an English language knowledge graph using foreign language labels. We argue that, for low-resource languages where substantial native knowledge graphs are lacking, this functionality can be used to lower the language barrier by allowing to formulate cross-linguistically applicable queries mediated by a multilingual dictionary.
Spicy Salmon: Converting between 50+ Annotation Formats with Fintan, Pepper, Salt and Powla (2022)

Heterogeneity of formats, models and annotations has always been a primary hindrance for exploiting the ever increasing amount of existing linguistic resources for real world applications in and beyond NLP. Fintan - the Flexible INtegrated Transformation and Annotation eNgineering platform introduced in 2020 is designed to rapidly convert, combine and manipulate language resources both in and outside the Semantic Web by transforming it into segmented RDF representations which can be processed in parallel on a multithreaded environment and integrating it with ontologies and taxonomies. Fintan has recently been extended with a set of additional modules increasing the amount of supported non-RDF formats and the interoperability with existing non-JAVA conversion tools, and parts of this work are demonstrated in this paper. In particular, we focus on a novel recipe for resource transformation in which Fintan works in tandem with the Pepper toolset to allow computational linguists to transform their data between over 50 linguistic corpus formats with a graphical workflow manager.
A Survey of Guidelines and Best Practices for the Generation, Interlinking, Publication, and Validation of Linguistic Linked Data (2022)

This article discusses a survey carried out within the NexusLinguarum COST Action which aimed to give an overview of existing guidelines (GLs) and best practices (BPs) in linguistic linked data. In particular it focused on four core tasks in the production/publication of linked data: generation, interlinking, publication, and validation. We discuss the importance of GLs and BPs for LLD before describing the survey and its results in full. Finally we offer a number of directions for future work in order to address the findings of the survey.
Computational Morphology with OntoLex-Morph (2022)

This paper describes the current status of the emerging OntoLex module for linguistic morphology. It serves as an update to the previous version of the vocabulary (Klimek et al. 2019). Whereas this earlier model was exclusively focusing on descriptive morphology and focused on applications in lexicography, we now present a novel part and a novel application of the vocabulary to applications in language technology, i.e., the rule-based generation of lexicons, introducing a dynamic component into OntoLex.
A Multilingual Benchmark to Capture Olfactory Situations over Time (2022)

We present a benchmark in six European languages containing manually annotated information about olfactory situations and events following a FrameNet-like approach. The documents selection covers ten domains of interest to cultural historians in the olfactory domain and includes texts published between 1620 to 1920, allowing a diachronic analysis of smell descriptions. With this work, we aim to foster the development of olfactory information extraction approaches as well as the analysis of changes in smell descriptions over time.
Language Acquisition, Neutral Change, and Diachronic Trends in Noun Classifiers (2022)

Languages around the world employ classifier systems as a method of semantic organization and categorization. These systems are rife with variability, violability, and ambiguity, and are prone to constant change over time. We explicitly model change in classifier systems as the population-level outcome of child language acquisition over time in order to shed light on the factors that drive change to classifier systems. Our research consists of two parts: a contrastive corpus study of Cantonese and Mandarin child-directed speech to determine the role that ambiguity and homophony avoidance may play in classifier learning and change followed by a series of population-level learning simulations of an abstract classifier system. We find that acquisition without reference to ambiguity avoidance is sufficient to drive broad trends in classifier change and suggest an additional role for adults and discourse factors in classifier death.
Deconstructing destruction: A Cognitive Linguistics perspective on a computational analysis of diachronic change (2022)

In this paper, we aim to introduce a Cognitive Linguistics perspective into a computational analysis of near-synonyms. We focus on a single set of Dutch near-synonyms, vernielen and vernietigen, roughly translated as {\textquoteleft}to destroy', replicating the analysis from Geeraerts (1997) with distributional models. Our analysis, which tracks the meaning of both words in a corpus of 16th-20th century prose data, shows that both lexical items have undergone semantic change, led by differences in their prototypical semantic core.