Queer in AI @ NAACL 2022!

About

If not properly studied and implemented, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models pose risk to marginalized communities, such as the queer community; to counterbalance these risks, it is paramount to make sure that queer researchers are included in the study, development, evaluation, and conversation around NLP technologies. Furthermore, Queer in AI’s demographic survey reveals that most queer scientists in our community do not feel completely welcome at conferences and in their work environments, with the main reasons being a lack of a supportive queer community and a lack of queer role models.

Over the past years, Queer in AI has worked towards addressing these critical issues, yet we have observed that the voices of marginalized queer communities – especially transgender, non-binary folks and queer BIPOC folks – have been neglected in this process. The purpose of this workshop is to highlight issues that these communities face by featuring talks and panel discussions on the inclusion of intersectional marginalized identities such as non-Western non-binary identities, as well as Black, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander non-cis folks in natural language processing.

Additionally, at Queer in AI’s socials at NAACL 2022, we will focus on creating a safe and inclusive casual networking and socializing space for queer folks involved with AI. Our goal is to host one in-person social and one virtual social.

Schedule and participation info

QueerInAI is hosting both in-person and online socials, at the affinity workshop at NAACL 2022. The detailed schedule is as follows:

07/09/2022: Virtual Workshop + Social [Time Zone: PDT (convert to your time zone)]

NAACL registration not required, but please fill this form to attend this event.

7:00 am - 7:15 am: Introduction to Queer in AI and Initiatives

7:15 am - 8:00 am: Keynote and QnA with Grace Elizabeth Dy on Queer Jewish Language

8:00 am - 8:30 am: Keynote and QnA with Kayo Yin on “Queer Impostor Syndrome”

8:30 am - 10:00 am: Socials!

07/10/2022: In-Person Workshop [Time Zone: PDT]

NAACL registration would be required to attend this event.

Venue: 506 Samish, Hyatt Regency Seattle, 808 Howell Street, Seattle, Washington, United States

9:00 am - 11:00 am: Joint Affinity Group Poster Session [Virtual]

11:00 am - 11:30 am: Introduction to Queer in AI and Initiatives

11:30 am - 12:30 pm: Panel on Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies

12:30 pm - 2:00 pm: Lunch Break

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm: Lightning talks by Sponsors

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm: Panel on Gender as a Variable in NLP

3:30 pm - 3:45 pm: Detecting Harmful Online Conversational Content towards LGBTQIA+ Individuals by Jamell Dacon

3:45 pm - 4:00 pm: Towards WinoQueer: Developing a Benchmark for Anti-Queer Bias in Large Language Models by Virginia K. Felkner

4:00 pm - 4:45 pm: Socials with Sponsors

4:45 pm - 5:00 pm: Conclusion

07/11/2022: In-Person Social [Time Zone: PDT]

To attend the social, sign up by July 9 through this form.

Venue: The Pine Box, 1600 Melrose Avenue, Seattle, Washington, United States

Time: 6pm PDT

Accepted papers

  • Detecting Harmful Online Conversational Content towards LGBTQIA+ Individuals. Jamell Dacon, Harry Shomer, Shaylynn Crum-Dacon, Jiliang Tang

  • Outed by an Algorithm: A Study on Facebook’s Friends Recommendation System for Queer, Trans and Gender-Non-Conforming Users. Jack Chang

  • Towards WinoQueer: Developing a Benchmark for Anti-Queer Bias in Large Language Models. Virginia K. Felkner, Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Eugene Jang, Jonathan May

  • Use of a Stylometric Map-Based Corpus for Tracking Individual Variation in Relation to Gender and Sex. Theodore Daniel Manning, Harleigh Niyu, Alejandro Jorge Napolitano Jawerbaum, Patrick Juola

  • Overview of STEM Science as Process, Data, Material, and Method Named Entities. Jennifer D'Souza

  • CNSC: Czech news article dataset for classification of originating source and its credibility. Matyáš Bohácek

  • Tackling Gender Microaggressions in Hindi. Vishakha Agrawal

Code of Conduct

Please read the Queer in AI code of conduct, which will be strictly followed at all times. Recording (screen recording or screenshots) is prohibited. All participants are expected to maintain the confidentiality of other participants.

NAACL 2022 adheres to the ACL Code of Conduct and Queer in AI adheres to Queer in AI Anti-harassment policy. Any participant who experiences harassment or hostile behavior may contact to NAACL exec team, or contact the Queer in AI Safety Team. Please be assured that if you approach us, your concerns will be kept in strict confidence, and we will consult with you on any actions taken.

Speakers and Panelists

Virtual Keynote: Queer Jewish Language

Grace Elizabeth Dy (they/them)

Grace Elizabeth Dy is the events and outreach coordinator at the University of Washington's Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as a co-principal investigator of “Yallah Y’all: The Development and Acceptance of Queer Jewish Language in Seattle.” A lifelong educator, their research interests include Hebrew language, public religious literacy, culturally-responsive mental health, and equitable teaching practices.

In this talk, Grace Elizabeth will discuss the various approaches to queering Jewish languages, factors influencing its formation and adaptation, and means of community transmission amongst Seattle Jews.

Virtual Keynote: “Queer Impostor Syndrome”

Kayo Yin (she/her)

Kayo Yin is a 0th year PhD student at UC Berkeley and a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University where she worked on model interpretability, machine translation, and sign language processing. She is currently living her hot intern summer at DeepMind London where she convinced her colleagues to join her rock band after she found a bass guitar in her office and became attached to the idea of becoming a bassist.

In this talk, Kayo will share her bittersweet experience as a straight-passing queer woman.

Panel: Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies

Vagrant Gautam (xe/xem)

Vagrant is a computational linguist and PhD student with both personal and professional experience with Gender™. Xe dreams of and is working towards a future with more neopronouns and fewer gender classifiers.

Os Keyes (they/them)

Os Keyes is a researcher and writer at the University of Washington. An inaugural recipient of the Ada Lovelace Fellowship, their work focuses on questions of power and technology with respect to gender, disability, and the self.

Lelia Marie Hampton (none)

Lelia is a Ph.D. student working on safely deploying AI systems in the real world with special consideration to marginalized people.

Morgan Klaus Scheuerman (he/him)

Morgan Klaus Scheuerman is a PhD candidate in Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder and Microsoft Research Fellow. His research focuses on experiences and representations of human identity in technological systems. He is primarily focused on how human identity is embedded in computer vision - how identity is constructed for computer vision and how those decisions are made by human actors.

Panel: Gender as a Variable in NLP

Beatrice Savoldi (she/her)

Beatrice is a PhD candidate at the University of Trento and Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), where she primarily researches gender bias in the cross-lingual context of translation technologies.

Karolina Stańczak (she/her)

Karolina is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at University of Copenhagen. Her PhD work focuses on gender bias detection in multilingual setups.

Arjun Subramonian (they/them)

Arjun is a Computer Science PhD student and Cota-Robles fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their research focuses on inclusive graph machine learning and natural language processing, including fairness, bias, ethics, and integrating queer perspectives. They are further a core organizer of Queer in AI, a NAACL 2022 DEI chair, and a NeurIPS 2022 Affinity Workshops chair. They also previously taught machine learning and AI ethics at under-resourced schools in LA. In their free time, they hike, run, spend as much time as possible with human and non-human animals alike (they love birding!), go to concerts, and play the ukulele.

Organizers

Luca Soldaini (Queer in AI & Allen Institute for AI)

Luca is an applied research scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) working on Semantic Scholar. Their current research interests are question answering and information retrieval systems operating at scale. They are also a core organizer at Queer In AI, where they help with event organization, scholarship programs, and sponsors relations.

Maria Ryskina (Carnegie Mellon University)

Maria is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University Language Technologies Institute. She works on building machine learning models with cognitively or linguistically motivated inductive biases to answer questions from computational linguistics and NLP. She is also an organizer at Queer in AI, involved mainly with the financial aid program.

Sharvani Jha (she/her) | Queer in AI & Microsoft

Sharvani is a software engineer at Microsoft (UCLA ‘21). She is a co-founder of QWER Hacks and is interested in AI ethics. At Queer In AI, she’s working on undergraduate mentorship, organizing Queer In AI workshops, coordinating social media, and more!

Maria Leonor Pacheco (Purdue University)

Maria is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. She is originally from Caracas, Venezuela. Her research focuses on deep structured prediction and neuro-symbolic methods for discourse analysis. She is one of the student chairs of the NAACL 2022 Student Research Workshop and an organizer of the LatinX in AI events in NLP.

Jeffrey Xiong (Columbia University)

Jeffrey is an undergraduate student at Columbia University, majoring in mathematics and computer science. Their research focuses on taking advantage of the properties of certain geometric spaces to develop better models for machine learning. Jeffrey is involved with Queer in AI conference organization and research into responsible use of AI.

Hetvi J (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi)

Hetvi is an undergraduate student at IIT Delhi, enrolled in the B. Tech Mathematics and Computing program. Hetvi is interested in research in Biology facilitated by theoretical CS approaches, and likes to collaborate with AI systems to make art. Hetvi is involved with Queer in AI as an organizer, mainly researching responsible use of AI.

Ava Asmani (University of California, Los Angeles)

Ava is an undergraduate student studying Electrical Engineering at UCLA. She is currently working in the Communications Systems Laboratory, researching and making high-rate list decoders. Ava is interested in the intersection between Artificial Intelligence and Electrical Engineering.

Davide Locatelli (he/him) | Polytechnic University of Catalonia
Davide is a PhD candidate at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona. As a member of the INTERACT research group, his work revolves around interactive machine learning. Currently, Davide is interested in developing models of natural language which can capture complex linguistic phenomena such as compositionality.

Contact Us

Email: queer-in-nlp@googlegroups.com