The scientific innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and more broadly in artificial intelligence (AI) is at its fastest pace to date. As large language models (LLMs) unleash a new era of automation, important debates emerge regarding the benefits and risks of their development, deployment and use. Currently, these debates have been dominated by often polarized narratives mainly led by the AI Safety and AI Ethics movements. This polarization, often amplified by social media, is swaying political agendas on AI regulation and governance and posing issues of regulatory capture. Capture occurs when the regulator advances the interests of the industry it is supposed to regulate, or of special interest groups rather than pursuing the general public interest. Meanwhile in NLP research, attention has been increasingly paid to the discussion of regulating risks and harms. This often happens without systematic methodologies or sufficient rooting in the disciplines that inspire an extended scope of NLP research, jeopardizing the scientific integrity of these endeavors. Regulation studies are a rich source of knowledge on how to systematically deal with risk and uncertainty, as well as with scientific evidence, to evaluate and compare regulatory options. This resource has largely remained untapped so far. In this paper, we argue how NLP research on these topics can benefit from proximity to regulatory studies and adjacent fields. We do so by discussing basic tenets of regulation, and risk and uncertainty, and by highlighting the shortcomings of current NLP discussions dealing with risk assessment. Finally, we advocate for the development of a new multidisciplinary research space on regulation and NLP (RegNLP), focused on connecting scientific knowledge to regulatory processes based on systematic methodologies.

自然语言处理和人工智能方面的科学创新正在以前所未有的速度发展。当前关于其发展、应用和使用的利益和风险的辩论主要由AI安全和AI伦理运动主导，而在NLP研究中，对风险和危害监管的讨论越来越多，但缺乏系统的方法论和与相关领域的深入联系。为了加强与监管研究的关联，我们提倡开展一个针对风险和NLP的多学科研究空间（RegNLP），以系统的方法将科学知识与监管流程相结合。

规范和自然语言处理：驯服大型语言模型