Give Me Convenience and Give Her Death: Who Should Decide What Uses of NLP are Appropriate, and on What Basis?

As part of growing NLP capabilities, coupled with an awareness of the ethical\ndimensions of research, questions have been raised about whether particular\ndatasets and tasks should be deemed off-limits for NLP research. We examine\nthis question with respect to a paper on automatic legal sentencing from EMNLP\n2019 which was a source of some debate, in asking whether the paper should have\nbeen allowed to be published, who should have been charged with making such a\ndecision, and on what basis. We focus in particular on the role of data\nstatements in ethically assessing research, but also discuss the topic of dual\nuse, and examine the outcomes of similar debates in other scientific\ndisciplines.\n