What’s next for the Gender, AI and MERL Working Group? An event series built in partnership with you!

The Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) inaugurated our Gender, AI and MERL Working Group earlier this year. During this initial meeting we mapped a number of themes/issues that community members are eager to discuss and explore together. 

As a next step, we –working group co-leads, Savita and Allison– are planning on hosting a series of monthly meetings, in which we hope to create and facilitate a space where we can have critical conversations with community members who are thinking about, researching and/or working with Gender, MERL and AI. In each meeting, we’d like to invite 1-2 guest speakers (from the working group and beyond) to share their learnings, insights and challenges related to Gender, MERL and AI. We are planning to alternate across research and theory to practical applications to discussions on ethics and justice.

We’ll kick this series off in June, with a conversation about GenAI and gender inclusion (register here to join us). In following months, we will focus on a range of topics, from selection of MERL tools, to gendered harms and risks of using AI (and what this means for MERL), to algorithmic bias, to AI, gender and evaluation, and more. 

Join us to share your learnings and questions with the working group

Our inaugural call showed us how much expertise lives in this community and we are eager to facilitate a space where we can all connect and share learnings with each other. If you or your organization are tackling challenges at the intersection of Gender, AI and MERL–whether you’re evaluating AI projects through a gender lens, designing ethical guidelines, building AI tools for MERL, or studying gendered impacts–, we’d love for you to join us. We’ll also be taking a look at the people you recommended we reach out to as speakers during our kick off meeting. Please let us know if you’d like to propose a session, join us as a speaker, share your insights, challenges and learnings in an upcoming meeting. 

Let’s keep the momentum going and make the next sessions even richer–your work could spark new collaborations and move the field forward. We’re excited to learn from you!

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The NLP-CoP brings together MERL practitioners, AI experts, and data responsibility advocates to learn and collaborate. We focus on responsible, appropriate, and effective applications of NLP (including Generative AI) to address demand-driven, real-world MERL challenges. In case you’re not part of the NLP-CoP yet, you can learn more and sign up here.