Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP

Personal names simultaneously differentiate individuals and categorize them in ways that are important in a given society. While the natural language processing community has thus associated personal names with sociodemographic characteristics in a variety of tasks, researchers have engaged to varying degrees with the established methodological problems in doing so. To guide future work, we present an interdisciplinary background on names and naming. We then survey the issues inherent to associating names with sociodemographic attributes, covering problems of validity (e.g., systematic error, construct validity), as well as ethical concerns (e.g., harms, differential impact, cultural insensitivity). Finally, we provide guiding questions along with normative recommendations to avoid validity and ethical pitfalls when dealing with names and sociodemographic characteristics in natural language processing.

What is the Point of Fairness? Disability, AI and The Complexity of Justice

Work integrating conversations around AI and Disability is vital and valued, particularly when done through a lens of fairness. Yet at the same time, analyzing the ethical implications of AI for disabled people solely through the lens of a singular idea of "fairness" risks reinforcing existing power dynamics, either through reinforcing the position of existing medical gatekeepers, or promoting tools and techniques that benefit otherwise-privileged disabled people while harming those who are rendered outliers in multiple ways. In this paper we present two case studies from within computer vision - a subdiscipline of AI focused on training algorithms that can "see" - of technologies putatively intended to help disabled people but, through failures to consider structural injustices in their design, are likely to result in harms not addressed by a "fairness" framing of ethics. Drawing on disability studies and critical data science, we call on researchers into AI ethics and disability to move beyond simplistic notions of fairness, and towards notions of justice.