Language Generation Models Can Cause Harm: So What Can We Do About It? An Actionable Survey

Sachin Kumar, Vidhisha Balachandran, Lucille Njoo, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Yulia Tsvetkov


Abstract
Recent advances in the capacity of large language models to generate human-like text have resulted in their increased adoption in user-facing settings. In parallel, these improvements have prompted a heated discourse around the risks of societal harms they introduce, whether inadvertent or malicious. Several studies have explored these harms and called for their mitigation via development of safer, fairer models. Going beyond enumerating the risks of harms, this work provides a survey of practical methods for addressing potential threats and societal harms from language generation models. We draw on several prior works’ taxonomies of language model risks to present a structured overview of strategies for detecting and ameliorating different kinds of risks/harms of language generators. Bridging diverse strands of research, this survey aims to serve as a practical guide for both LM researchers and practitioners, with explanations of different strategies’ motivations, their limitations, and open problems for future research.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.241
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3299–3321
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.241
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.241
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sachin Kumar, Vidhisha Balachandran, Lucille Njoo, Antonios Anastasopoulos, and Yulia Tsvetkov. 2023. Language Generation Models Can Cause Harm: So What Can We Do About It? An Actionable Survey. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3299–3321, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language Generation Models Can Cause Harm: So What Can We Do About It? An Actionable Survey (Kumar et al., EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.241.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.241.mp4