Yes, We Care! Results of the Ethics and Natural Language Processing Surveys

We present here the context and results of two surveys (a French one and an international one) concerning Ethics and NLP, which we designed and conducted between June and September 2015. These surveys follow other actions related to raising concern for ethics in our community, including a Journée d’études, a workshop and the Ethics and Big Data Charter. The concern for ethics shows to be quite similar in both surveys, despite a few differences which we present and discuss. The surveys also lead to think there is a growing awareness in the field concerning ethical issues, which translates into a willingness to get involved in ethics-related actions, to debate about the topic and to see ethics be included in major conferences themes. We finally discuss the limits of the surveys and the means of action we consider for the future. The raw data from the two surveys are freely available online.