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Practising responsibility: Ethics in NLP as a hands-on course

Paper · 2026 · Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti and Beatrice Savoldi

Summary

The paper describes a dedicated university course on the ethics of language technology. The authors argue that NLP curricula have lagged behind the field's growing attention to social impact. Ethics was often covered only in isolated lectures, and it is hard to teach because the area changes quickly and calls for critical reflection more than technical skill. Their offering, titled "Ethical Aspects in Natural Language Processing," was launched in 2021/2022 within Groningen's BSc Information Science and afterwards adapted for Master's programmes in Pavia and Turin.

The six weeks of content follow the whole NLP pipeline:

  • bias and debiasing
  • dual use and stakeholders
  • data ownership, documentation and annotation
  • evaluation and reporting practices

Teaching relies on active learning: interactive lectures, hands-on labs, and "learning by teaching." In group final projects, students explain ethical issues to outside audiences such as researchers, school pupils and the public.

The paper gives no quantitative evaluation. Its contribution is a tested, flexible course design, reusable teaching materials and student-made outreach products. It also offers an honest account of the costs and challenges, which may help educators adding social-impact topics to NLP teaching.

Key points

  • Format: The course carries 5–6 ECTS with 28–36 contact hours over six weeks. Each week has a two-hour lecture and a two-hour lab seminar. Weekly group assignments are marked only pass/fail (0/1) but are required before the final project.
  • Editions: The course has run in Groningen since 2021/2022, reaching its fifth edition in 2025/2026. It also ran in Pavia's MA Linguistics as a 36-hour crash course over six days, and in Turin's MA Language Technologies and Digital Humanities, where a philosopher co-taught it (both in 2023/24 and 2024/25).
  • Classroom activities: These included live transcription of class talk to question what counts as data and who owns it, and emotion annotation exercises.
  • Final projects: Projects included interviews with ACL researchers (e.g., Dirk Hovy, Saif Mohammad, Yulia Tsvetkov), high-school presentations, card games, podcasts, interactive demos, illustrated books, and leaflets for primary-school children and care-home residents.
  • Materials and limitations: Materials are available at github.com/ethics-handson/teaching. The stated limitations are heavy logistical effort, subjective grading, production costs and local-language barriers.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Social Sciences · 1,772 worksSafety Research · 543 worksEngineering · 133 worksEducation · 203 worksArchitecture · 2 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Bias, fairness & safety · 517 works

Cite

Cite as Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti and Beatrice Savoldi. 2026. Practising responsibility: Ethics in NLP as a hands-on course. Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing (TeachNLP 2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.teachingnlp-1.14

@inproceedings{nissim2026practising,
  title = {{Practising responsibility: Ethics in NLP as a hands-on course}},
  author = {Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti and Beatrice Savoldi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing (TeachNLP 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.teachingnlp-1.14},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.teachingnlp-1.14}
}

References

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