LEGAL 2024 : Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies

[Apologies for cross-postings]

1st CfP LEGAL 2024
Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies
Workshop at LREC-COLING 2024, Turin, Italy

https://legal2024.mobileds.de/

May 25, 2024


About the Workshop

2023 is likely to be remembered as a year dominated by discussions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM). These technologies require data to be collected and utilized in unprecedented amounts. Large sets of Language data are owned by stakeholders that are not necessarily involved in the development of such technologies. To use these sets for AI and LLM, it is essential to repackage and repurpose them for such endeavor. Language data, despite their intangible nature, are often subject to legal constraints which need to be addressed in order to guarantee lawful access to and re-use of these data. In recent years, considerable efforts have been made to adapt legal frameworks to the advancements in technology while taking into account the interests of various stakeholders. From the technological perspective, the strict consideration of legal aspects imposes further questions besides pure recording technology and participant consent. This arises in several key elements:

- What is the Intellectual Proprietary status of Large Language sets, the corresponding Large Language Models, and their potential outputs?
- How can identifying information used in deep learning be removed or anonymized (and is this mandatory), how reliable are predictions/ models based on anonymized data?
- Which impact does this have on the usability, computational costs?


The purpose of this full-day workshop is to build bridges between technology and legal framework, and discuss current legal and ethical issues in the human language technology sector.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: March 4, 2024
Notification of Acceptance: March 30, 2024
Camera ready: April 5, 2024
Workshop Day: May 25, 2024

Topics

- Impact of statutory exceptions on text and speech data mining practices in the field of Human Language Technologies.
- Impact of the regulatory environment at the international level (e.g. EU Data Act, Digital Governance Act, Digital Services Act, AI Act; the Chinese “2023 draft rules on generative AI”, the USA Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and other international or national regulations) on the circulation and use of language data.
- Legal issues related to the production and use of Large Language Models (Intellectual Property, Data Governance and Data Protection aspects).
- Concrete applications as to how language technologies can help resolve legal issues related to data collection, data sharing and data reuse.
- Ethical considerations related to personal data collection and re-use
- Trust and transparency in language and speech technologies
- Efficient anonymization techniques, and the related responsibility, and their impact on usability and performance
- Re-identification issues/De-anonymization approaches and techniques
- Harmonizing differing perspectives of data scientists and legal experts, worldwide


Submission

1500-2000 words extended abstracts are needed at first for submission. The full papers will be published as workshop proceedings along with the LREC-COLING main conference. For these, the instructions of the main conference need to be followed

Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC-COLING authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).

Organizers

Ingo Siegert, OvG University Magdeburg (Germany)
Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA (France)
Pawel Kamocki, IDS Mannheim (Germany)
Kossay Talmoudi, ELDA (France)