National newspapers et. al. are one thing, but I must admit it was a little more fun for me to see the Tactical Language project mentioned on LanguageHat.
The coments down below the main article were a grim reminder to the ethical problems that one faces in Computer Science and Linguistics.
It’s funny: I remember way back in high school being happy that I could live a life without having to deal with hard ethical problems like my other friends who were planning on pursuing careers in medicine and law would have to face. What could be more abstract, more removed from the bitter pragmatics of the world, than studying computer science?
Long years pass, I discover natural language processing, and fall in love with it. But I remember the day I realized that machine translation, named entity tagging, text summarization, etc.–all these innocent tools that I’d be creating–all have their more and, err, less ethical uses.
That was a big realization.
At the same time, it is reassuring that at least most of the professors I’ve talked to (including my own advisor), are aware of the ethical ramifications of what we are doing, and have strong moral viewpoints. It’s nice to know I’m not just a tool of Ashcroft and his lackeys…
But… It is nice to see that the fruits of NLP research can be ethically positive as well as negative. Our Arabic teaching project is actually used to train soldiers for peace-keeping… and there’s something heartening about the knowledge that I’ll be helping to wipe out miscommunication problems over there…
It’s much better than some alternative applications of NLP, that’s for sure…