As part of growing NLP capabilities, coupled with an awareness of the ethical dimensions of research, questions have been raised about whether particular datasets and tasks should be deemed off-limits for NLP research. We examine this question with respect to a paper on automatic legal sentencing from EMNLP 2019 which was a source of some debate, in asking whether the paper should have been allowed to be published, who should have been charged with making such a decision, and on what basis. We focus in particular on the role of data statements in ethically assessing research, but also discuss the topic of dual use, and examine the outcomes of similar debates in other scientific disciplines.

Automatic metrics are fundamental for the development and evaluation of machine translation systems. Judging whether, and to what extent, automatic metrics concur with the gold standard of human evaluation is not a straightforward problem. We show that current methods for judging metrics are highly sensitive to the translations used for assessment, particularly the presence of outliers, which often leads to falsely confident conclusions about a metric’s efficacy. Finally, we turn to pairwise system ranking, developing a method for thresholding performance improvement under an automatic metric against human judgements, which allows quantification of type I versus type II errors incurred, i.e., insignificant human differences in system quality that are accepted, and significant human differences that are rejected. Together, these findings suggest improvements to the protocols for metric evaluation and system performance evaluation in machine translation.

In this paper, we apply pre-trained language models to the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task, with a specific focus on the clinical domain. In low-resource setting of clinical STS, these large models tend to be impractical and prone to overfitting. Building on BERT, we study the impact of a number of model design choices, namely different fine-tuning and pooling strategies. We observe that the impact of domain-specific fine-tuning on clinical STS is much less than that in the general domain, likely due to the concept richness of the domain. Based on this, we propose two data augmentation techniques. Experimental results on N2C2-STS 1 demonstrate substantial improvements, validating the utility of the proposed methods.

Identifying the reasons for antibiotic administration in veterinary records is a critical component of understanding antimicrobial usage patterns. This informs antimicrobial stewardship programs designed to fight antimicrobial resistance, a major health crisis affecting both humans and animals in which veterinarians have an important role to play. We propose a document classification approach to determine the reason for administration of a given drug, with particular focus on domain adaptation from one drug to another, and instance selection to minimize annotation effort.