English

Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems

Computation and Language 2017-11-27 v1

Abstract

The use of dialogue systems as a medium for human-machine interaction is an increasingly prevalent paradigm. A growing number of dialogue systems use conversation strategies that are learned from large datasets. There are well documented instances where interactions with these system have resulted in biased or even offensive conversations due to the data-driven training process. Here, we highlight potential ethical issues that arise in dialogue systems research, including: implicit biases in data-driven systems, the rise of adversarial examples, potential sources of privacy violations, safety concerns, special considerations for reinforcement learning systems, and reproducibility concerns. We also suggest areas stemming from these issues that deserve further investigation. Through this initial survey, we hope to spur research leading to robust, safe, and ethically sound dialogue systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.09050,
  title  = {Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems},
  author = {Peter Henderson and Koustuv Sinha and Nicolas Angelard-Gontier and Nan Rosemary Ke and Genevieve Fried and Ryan Lowe and Joelle Pineau},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09050},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

In Submission to the AAAI/ACM conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:56:09.338Z