Practising responsibility: Ethics in NLP as a hands-on course
Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti, Beatrice Savoldi
TL;DR
The paper presents a hands-on course, Ethical Aspects in Natural Language Processing, designed to embed ethics in NLP education through active learning and a capstone that engages diverse audiences. It documents six weeks of instruction, a modular set of contents and materials, and a final project that shifts from expert interviews to public-facing outreach as the program evolves across Groningen, Pavia, and Turin. Key contributions include a scalable course design, a rich set of teaching materials, and a suite of educational outreach products (card games, books, podcasts, demos) that embody responsible NLP communication and can be reused by other educators. The work demonstrates practical impact by fostering critical thinking, broad awareness, and public literacy around NLP ethics, with clear implications for curriculum development in AI-related fields.
Abstract
As Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems become more pervasive, integrating ethical considerations into NLP education has become essential. However, this presents inherent challenges in curriculum development: the field's rapid evolution from both academia and industry, and the need to foster critical thinking beyond traditional technical training. We introduce our course on Ethical Aspects in NLP and our pedagogical approach, grounded in active learning through interactive sessions, hands-on activities, and "learning by teaching" methods. Over four years, the course has been refined and adapted across different institutions, educational levels, and interdisciplinary backgrounds; it has also yielded many reusable products, both in the form of teaching materials and in the form of actual educational products aimed at diverse audiences, made by the students themselves. By sharing our approach and experience, we hope to provide inspiration for educators seeking to incorporate social impact considerations into their curricula.