Join the next NLP Working Group Meeting: Exploring the opportunities and risks of ChatGPT

Released in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has catapulted Natural Language Processing (NLP) into the mainstream. For MERL practitioners, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard offer exciting opportunities to automate and speed-up time-consuming tasks that involve analyzing and generating text. Use-case examples include summarizing text data, extracting key information from text, analyzing and classifying text content, generating text, translation and more. 

ChatGPT, however, has important limitations and risks. It is currently impossible to check the facts and logic behind the answers given by the tool. Furthermore, the tool is trained on a snapshot of the internet in 2021, so is not able to factor in current events when generating answers. Training the tool on the internet and other historical data sets also comes with significant risks of perpetuating biases (racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and more). Although the tool is multilingual, it is trained on the largely English speaking Internet and English-language texts, with English speakers’ cultural biases attached.

March 8 Working Group Meeting

Join us on Thursday, March 8, 2023 for our next (virtual only) NLP Working Group meeting (5am PST / 8am ET / 1pm UK / 2pm CET / 3pm SAST /  4pm EAT / 6.30 Delhi / 8pm BKK / 9pm Manila).

At this 1-hour session we’ll have a facilitated discussion focussed on the following topics:

1. Demo of ChatGPT: What can it do?
2. How might MERL practitioners use it?
3. How does ChatGPT work?
4. What are the limitations, ethics and risks?
5. Next steps for the NLP WG

Each topic discussion will be facilitated by a working group member, and open to contributions and ideas from all attendees. Special Guest Rick Davies will take us through some of the ideas in his latest blog post on using ChatGPT to stimulate our thinking.

Please let us know if you would be keen to be a topic facilitator at one of our future meetings! You don’t need to be an expert on the topic.

Register now!

Register here to join the next Working Group meeting. (Upon registration, you will receive a link for the call).

Join the working group!

The working group welcomes all Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) practitioners and data practitioners interested in using text analytics approaches for MERL in the development, humanitarian, peacebuilding, and related social sectors. All MERL practitioners are welcome, no prior knowledge of text analytics is needed. Specialist data scientists and NLP specialists are also welcome. Working Group meetings will cover both technical and non-technical aspects; e.g. ethical and inclusive use. We especially encourage practitioners living and working in the Global South to join. 

Please see this blog to find out more about the group and email linda (at) MERLTech.org with “Join NLPWG” in the subject line if you’d like to be a part of it.