Missing Information, Unresponsive Authors, Experimental Flaws: The Impossibility of Assessing the Reproducibility of Previous Human Evaluations in NLP

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01633v2
• Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2023 09:54:55 GMT
• Title: Missing Information, Unresponsive Authors, Experimental Flaws: The Impossibility of Assessing the Reproducibility of Previous Human Evaluations in NLP
• Authors: Anya Belz, Craig Thomson, Ehud Reiter, Gavin Abercrombie, Jose M. Alonso-Moral, Mohammad Arvan, Anouck Braggaar, Mark Cieliebak, Elizabeth Clark, Kees van Deemter, Tanvi Dinkar, Ond\v{r}ej Du\v{s}ek, Steffen Eger, Qixiang Fang, Mingqi Gao, Albert Gatt, Dimitra Gkatzia, Javier Gonz\'alez-Corbelle, Dirk Hovy, Manuela H\"urlimann, Takumi Ito, John D. Kelleher, Filip Klubicka, Emiel Krahmer, Huiyuan Lai, Chris van der Lee, Yiru Li, Saad Mahamood, Margot Mieskes, Emiel van Miltenburg, Pablo Mosteiro, Malvina Nissim, Natalie Parde, Ond\v{r}ej Pl\'atek, Verena Rieser, Jie Ruan, Joel Tetreault, Antonio Toral, Xiaojun Wan, Leo Wanner, Lewis Watson, Diyi Yang
• Abstract summary: Just 13% of papers had (i) sufficiently low barriers to reproduction, and (ii) enough obtainable information, to be considered for reproduction. As a result, we had to change our coordinated study design from a reproduce approach to a standardise-then-reproduce-twice approach.
• Score: 84.08476873280644
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: We report our efforts in identifying a set of previous human evaluations in NLP that would be suitable for a coordinated study examining what makes human evaluations in NLP more/less reproducible. We present our results and findings, which include that just 13\% of papers had (i) sufficiently low barriers to reproduction, and (ii) enough obtainable information, to be considered for reproduction, and that all but one of the experiments we selected for reproduction was discovered to have flaws that made the meaningfulness of conducting a reproduction questionable. As a result, we had to change our coordinated study design from a reproduce approach to a standardise-then-reproduce-twice approach. Our overall (negative) finding that the great majority of human evaluations in NLP is not repeatable and/or not reproducible and/or too flawed to justify reproduction, paints a dire picture, but presents an opportunity for a rethink about how to design and report human evaluations in NLP.

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