The widespread use of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly among non-expert users, has raised ethical concerns about the propagation of harmful biases. While much research has addressed social biases, few works, if any, have examined anthropocentric bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. Anthropocentric language prioritizes human value, framing non-human animals, living entities, and natural elements solely by their utility to humans; a perspective that contributes to the ecological crisis. In this paper, we evaluate anthropocentric bias in OpenAI’s GPT-4o across various target entities, including sentient beings, non-sentient entities, and natural elements. Using prompts eliciting neutral, anthropocentric, and ecocentric perspectives, we analyze the model’s outputs and introduce a manually curated glossary of 424 anthropocentric terms as a resource for future ecocritical research. Our findings reveal a strong anthropocentric bias in the model’s responses, underscoring the need to address human-centered language use in AI-generated text to promote ecological well-being.

Over the past decade, the analysis of discourses on climate change (CC) has gained increased interest within the social sciences and the NLP community. Textual resources are crucial for understanding how narratives about this phenomenon are crafted and delivered. However, there still is a scarcity of datasets that cover CC in news media in a representative way. This paper presents a CC-specific subcorpus extracted from the 1.8 million New York Times Annotated Corpus, marking the first CC analysis on this data. The subcorpus was created by combining different methods for text selection to ensure representativeness and reliability, which is further validated using ClimateBERT. To provide initial insights into the CC subcorpus, we discuss the results of a topic modeling experiment (LDA). These show the diversity of contexts in which CC is discussed in news media over time, which is relevant for various downstream tasks.

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.