Ethics Sheet for Automatic Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis

• Published in: Computational linguistics - Association for Computational Linguistics Vol. 48; no. 2; pp. 239 - 278
• Main Author: Mohammad, Saif M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: One Broadway, 12th Floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA MIT Press 09.06.2022; MIT Press Journals, The; The MIT Press
• Subjects: Affective computing; Automation; Computational linguistics; Data mining; Emotion recognition; Emotions; Ethics; Public health; Recognition; Sentiment analysis
• ISSN: 0891-2017; 1530-9312
• DOI: 10.1162/coli_a_00433

The importance and pervasiveness of emotions in our lives makes affective computing a tremendously important and vibrant line of work. Systems for automatic emotion recognition (AER) and sentiment analysis can be facilitators of enormous progress (e.g., in improving public health and commerce) but also enablers of great harm (e.g., for suppressing dissidents and manipulating voters). Thus, it is imperative that the affective computing community actively engage with the ethical ramifications of their creations. In this article, I have synthesized and organized information from AI Ethics and Emotion Recognition literature to present fifty ethical considerations relevant to AER. Notably, this ethics sheet fleshes out assumptions hidden in how AER is commonly framed, and in the choices often made regarding the data, method, and evaluation. Special attention is paid to the implications of AER on privacy and social groups. Along the way, key recommendations are made for responsible AER. The objective of the ethics sheet is to facilitate and encourage more thoughtfulness on why to automate, how to automate, and how to judge success the building of AER systems. Additionally, the ethics sheet acts as a useful introductory document on emotion recognition (complementing survey articles).