CFP EACL 2024: Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI (Malta)

Call for papers: European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI:
Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights, 21-22 March 2024, Malta. Deadline: 18 December 2023.

Conversational language technologies (chatbots, voice assistants, and multimodal conversational interfaces) are becoming increasingly complex and common in everyday life. Various language theories (such as speech act theory, politeness theory, conversation analysis, and interaction theory) have started influencing their development. At the same time, the development of these technologies is often driven by technology-related concerns and tends to overlook users’ needs and socio-cultural contexts. This, combined with the scarcity of human rights regulation of AI, raises concerns about linguistic discrimination, exclusion, surveillance, and security risks. In addition, training data for conversational AI mostly comes from written rather than interaction-based language data sets and often does not include gestural, social, and emotional aspects that are fundamental to human interaction. In the same vein, Sign Language is rarely facilitated. To promote a positive impact of conversational technology on linguistic diversity and inclusion, it is imperative to strike a balance between technological concerns and socially relevant matters.

This workshop to be held at EACL aims at addressing these issues by using a holistic approach that involves dialogue and collaboration among technologists, linguists, policymakers, and communities involved in the development and commissioning of conversational AI systems.

Key Themes:

Holistic Approach: Bridging the gap between technology and socio-cultural context.
Ethical Development: Addressing concerns of linguistic discrimination, exclusion, surveillance, and security risks.
Inclusive Data Sets: Emphasizing the importance of interaction-based language data sets and inclusion of gestural, social, and emotional aspects.