# Give Me Convenience and Give Her Death: Who Should Decide What Uses of NLP are Appropriate, and on What Basis?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13213 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13213/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

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- [Can Machines Learn Morality? The Delphi Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07574/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11410/) (2021)
- [FairLex: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Fairness in Legal Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07228/) (2022)
- [Generate, Prune, Select: A Pipeline for Counterspeech Generation against Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01625/) (2021)
- [On the Ethical Limits of Natural Language Processing on Legal Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02751/) (2021)
- [Reliability Testing for Natural Language Processing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02590/) (2021)
- [Listening to Affected Communities to Define Extreme Speech: Dataset and Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11764/) (2022)
- [Towards Climate Awareness in NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05071/) (2022)
- [The Intended Uses of Automated Fact-Checking Artefacts: Why, How and Who](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14238/) (2023)
- [Towards a multi-stakeholder value-based assessment framework for algorithmic systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04525/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Task Dependency and Contrastive Learning for Case Outcome Classification on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00768/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2021): Workshop and Shared Task Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07865/) (2021)
- [Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12544/) (2023)
- [Morality is Non-Binary: Building a Pluralist Moral Sentence Embedding Space using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17228/) (2024)
- [Japanese Tort-case Dataset for Rationale-supported Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00480/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2022): Workshop and Shared Task Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11359/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18644/) (2024)
- [Thorny Roses: Investigating the Dual Use Dilemma in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08315/) (2023)
- [FinTech for Social Good: A Research Agenda from NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06431/) (2022)
- [Sociocultural knowledge is needed for selection of shots in hate speech detection tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01890/) (2023)
- [Social Good or Scientific Curiosity? Uncovering the Research Framing Behind NLP Artefacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18677/) (2025)
- [Machine Learning for Detection and Analysis of Novel LLM Jailbreaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01644/) (2025)
- [Don't "research fast and break things": On the ethics of Computational Social Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06370/) (2022)
- [The Ethics of Automating Legal Actors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00584/) (2023)
- [Is the ACL Responsible NLP Checklist a Box-Ticking Exercise? A Large-Scale Analysis of EMNLP 2025](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09280/) (2026)
- [Beyond Good Intentions: When Does the Framing of Multilingual and Low-Resource NLP Research Become a Caricature?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30866/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As part of growing NLP capabilities, coupled with an awareness of the ethical dimensions of research, questions have been raised about whether particular datasets and tasks should be deemed off-limits for NLP research. We examine this question with respect to a paper on automatic legal sentencing from EMNLP 2019 which was a source of some debate, in asking whether the paper should have been allowed to be published, who should have been charged with making such a decision, and on what basis. We focus in particular on the role of data statements in ethically assessing research, but also discuss the topic of dual use, and examine the outcomes of similar debates in other scientific disciplines.