Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| _version_ | 1866910527697977344 |
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| author | Gautam, Vagrant Subramonian, Arjun Lauscher, Anne Keyes, Os |
| author_facet | Gautam, Vagrant Subramonian, Arjun Lauscher, Anne Keyes, Os |
| contents | Personal names simultaneously differentiate individuals and categorize them in ways that are important in a given society. While the natural language processing community has thus associated personal names with sociodemographic characteristics in a variety of tasks, researchers have engaged to varying degrees with the established methodological problems in doing so. To guide future work that uses names and sociodemographic characteristics, we provide an overview of relevant research: first, we present an interdisciplinary background on names and naming. We then survey the issues inherent to associating names with sociodemographic attributes, covering problems of validity (e.g., systematic error, construct validity), as well as ethical concerns (e.g., harms, differential impact, cultural insensitivity). Finally, we provide guiding questions along with normative recommendations to avoid validity and ethical pitfalls when dealing with names and sociodemographic characteristics in natural language processing. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17159 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP Gautam, Vagrant Subramonian, Arjun Lauscher, Anne Keyes, Os Computation and Language Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction Personal names simultaneously differentiate individuals and categorize them in ways that are important in a given society. While the natural language processing community has thus associated personal names with sociodemographic characteristics in a variety of tasks, researchers have engaged to varying degrees with the established methodological problems in doing so. To guide future work that uses names and sociodemographic characteristics, we provide an overview of relevant research: first, we present an interdisciplinary background on names and naming. We then survey the issues inherent to associating names with sociodemographic attributes, covering problems of validity (e.g., systematic error, construct validity), as well as ethical concerns (e.g., harms, differential impact, cultural insensitivity). Finally, we provide guiding questions along with normative recommendations to avoid validity and ethical pitfalls when dealing with names and sociodemographic characteristics in natural language processing. |
| title | Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP |
| topic | Computation and Language Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17159 |