Human-Centered & Ethical Low-Resource NLP
Undergraduate and Graduate course, Addis Ababa Institute of Technology, ECES, 2023
Designed and taught a course at AAiT for BSc and MSc students. Click the title to see the syllabus.
Human Centered & Ethical Low Resource Language NLP (HCELR-NLP)
Inst: Hellina Hailu Nigatu
Introduction
NLP has seen rapid development in the past few years, particularly with the advance of Large Language Models. While we have reaped the benefits of NLP, in domain line machine translation, sentiment analysis, question answering, and summarization to name a few, we have also seen failure cases, exported harms, and usability issues. In particular, low-resource languages or languages with limited data suffer from poor-quality tools or are not represented at all in these systems.
In this class, we will focus on literature from three different areas: (1) we will look at works from HCI to understand how to build usable and accessible tools, (2) we will look at papers from ethics and STS to understand the impact of technological systems, in particular NLP tools, (3) we will study NLP literature with a focus on low-resource language NLP.
Learning Goals
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
Have foundational knowledge in
- HCI: Needfinding, Usability, Participatory research
- Ethics: Ethical frameworks, Audits
- NLP: Applications, low-resource settings
- Read critically and understand papers on HCI, NLP and Ethics
- Develop paper reading/understanding skills.
- Participate and lead brainstorming sessions.
- Acquire paper critiquing skills.
Time: 2 times a week; 1 and a half hours each.
Expectations:
- There are no pre-requisite classes.
- Interest in HCI and AI is highly encouraged.
- Students are expected to lead 10 minute discussions for at least one session in the whole course. There will be a sign-up sheet provided.
Course Policy
This course has zero tolerance for discrimination based on gender, religion, ethnicity, disability, class or any other form of identity. Students are expected to create a safe environment for themselves and their peers.
Course Schedule
You can find the course scedule and reading list here.
Reading Group
This class came about as an extension to a virtual reading group with 14 undergrads at Addis Ababa University and abroad with interst in low-resoruce language NLP.
Students
Bellow is a list of students who wanted their names displayed on the website. Reach out to them if you have common research intersts!