11-430 Ethics, Social Biases, and Positive Impact in Language Technologies
12 units, Carnegie Mellon University
As language technologies have become increasingly prevalent, there is a growing awareness that decisions we make about our data, methods, and tools are often tied up with their impact on people and societies. This course introduces students to real-world applications of language technologies and the potential ethical implications associated with them. We discuss philosophical foundations of ethical research along with advanced state-of-the art techniques. Discussion topics include: - Philosophical foundations: ethical philosophies, history, medical and psychological experiments, IRB and human subjects, ethical decision making, AI alignment. - Bias, Misrepresentation, Alignment: algorithms to identify biases in models and data and adversarial approaches to debiasing. - Civility in communication: techniques to monitor trolling, hate speech, abusive language, cyberbullying, toxic comments. - Democracy and the language of manipulation: approaches to identify propaganda and manipulation in news, to identify fake news, political framing. - Privacy & security : algorithms for demographic inference, personality profiling, and anonymization of demographic and personal traits. - NLP for Social Good: Low-resource NLP, applications for disaster response and monitoring diseases, medical applications, psychological counseling, interfaces for accessibility. - Multidisciplinary perspective: invited lectures from experts in behavioral and social sciences, rhetoric, etc.
Prerequisites: none listed
Offered: Spring 2027, Spring 2026
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