Workshop: Sustainable language representations for a changing world (NoDaLiDa 2021)

One-day online workshop to be held 31 May, in conjunction with NoDaLiDa 2021

This workshop will discuss how language representations or language models can be built to be sustainable in face of changing language, new domains of application, new demands from the surrounding use cases and business models, and a changing world. The intention of the workshop is to raise awareness of some identified issues and to invite new related issues to be addressed, potentially in future workshops or debates. 

Find all information on the workshop page at Språkbanken Text, here
Registration deadline 17 May. 

• Don't forget to register by 17 May – note that once you have registered you can attend as many or few sessions as you want (or have the time for).
• You can still submit a position statement!

Workshop topics

The workshop will be organised around different overlapping challenges when it comes to making language models sustainable, and to assessing the qualities and characteristics of language models:

Technical challenges

• model cards and consumer or downstream user declaration of content
• sustainability over temporal change
• applicability to new domains
• assessing quality and coverage of a model

Societal challenges 

• sensitivity to bias and prejudice
• coverage over varieties, dialects, minority languages
• differential privacy
• personal integrity and intimacy

Legal challenges

• the right to be forgotten and anonymisation of training data
• intellectual property rights with respect to training data and output of a language model
• liabilities and risks in using a language model as part of a service

Program, Monday 31 May

10:00–11:30 Societal challenges
Invited talk: Linda Mannila, Digismart
Position Statements: Christina Tånnannder and Björn Westling "Language models at the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media" and Marina Santini, Evelina Rennes, Daniel Holmer and Arne Jönsson "Human-in-the-loop: Where does text complexity lie?"
Open Discussion 
Concluding remarks

13:00–14:30 Technical challenges
Invited talk: Elisabet Lobo Vesga, Chalmers: An introduction to differential privacy
Position Statements: Jenny Kunz: Data Transparency and Interpretability of Language Representations and Riley Capshaw, Eva Blomqvist, Marina Santini and Marjan Alirezaie: BERT is as Gentle as a Sledgehammer: Too powerful or Too Blunt? It Depends on the Benchmark.
Open Discussion 
Concluding remarks

15:00–16:30 Legal challenges
Invited talk: TBA
Position Statements: TBA
Open Discussion 
Concluding remarks

The aim of the workshop is to formulate a statement on criteria for assessing the quality and sustainability of language models. We intend to publish this statement to a broader audience after the workshop in some suitable way, which will be discussed in the final session. 
 

Organisers

The workshop is organised by the Vinnova-financed project Svenskt Språkdatalabb (Swedish Language Data Lab), in cooperation with Språkbanken Text and Gavagai AB.

• Jussi Karlgren, Spotify Research, Stockholm
• Peter Ljunglöf, Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg

Please contact us if you have any questions.