English

Targeting the Benchmark: On Methodology in Current Natural Language Processing Research

Computation and Language 2020-07-10 v1

Abstract

It has become a common pattern in our field: One group introduces a language task, exemplified by a dataset, which they argue is challenging enough to serve as a benchmark. They also provide a baseline model for it, which then soon is improved upon by other groups. Often, research efforts then move on, and the pattern repeats itself. What is typically left implicit is the argumentation for why this constitutes progress, and progress towards what. In this paper, we try to step back for a moment from this pattern and work out possible argumentations and their parts.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.04792,
  title  = {Targeting the Benchmark: On Methodology in Current Natural Language Processing Research},
  author = {David Schlangen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.04792},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1908.10747

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:59:03.974Z