Invité ETeRNAL : Dirk Hovy

Neural Networks have revolutionized NLP: they have increased performance across the board, and enabled a number of applications that were not possible before. All this is a great opportunity, but also a new responsibility for NLP: never before was it so easy to write a powerful NLP system, never before did it have such a potential impact. These systems are increasingly used in applications they were not intended for, by people who treat them as interchangeable black boxes. The results can be simple performance drops, but also systematic biases against various user groups.

As a consequence, we as NLP practitioners suddenly have a new role, in addition to researcher and developer: considering the ethical implications of our systems, and educating the public about the possibilities and limitations of our work.The time of academic innocence is over, and we need to address this newfound responsibility as a community.

I will talk about the possibilities deep learning has opened up, and the caveats that come with it, and where this might lead NLP as a field. This includes both case examples and some provocations for future directions.