The ACL community has very little interest in evaluating the real-world impact of NLP systems. A structured survey of the ACL Anthology shows that perhaps 0.1% of its papers contain such evaluations; furthermore most papers which include impact evaluations present them very sketchily and instead focus on metric evaluations. NLP technology would be more useful and more quickly adopted if we seriously tried to understand and evaluate its real-world impact.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.05973,
title = {We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact},
author = {Ehud Reiter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05973},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
This paper will appear in Computational Linguistics journal as a "Last Word" opinion piece. The Arxiv version is a pre-MIT Press publication version