It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Progress in NLP is increasingly measured through benchmarks; hence, contextualizing progress requires understanding when and why practitioners may disagree about the validity of benchmarks. We develop a taxonomy of disagreement, drawing on tools from measurement modeling, and distinguish between two types of disagreement: 1) how tasks are conceptualized and 2) how measurements of model performance are operationalized. To provide evidence for our taxonomy, we conduct a meta-analysis of relevant literature to understand how NLP tasks are conceptualized, as well as a survey of practitioners about their impressions of different factors that affect benchmark validity. Our meta-analysis and survey across eight tasks, ranging from coreference resolution to question answering, uncover that tasks are generally not clearly and consistently conceptualized and benchmarks suffer from operationalization disagreements. These findings support our proposed taxonomy of disagreement. Finally, based on our taxonomy, we present a framework for constructing benchmarks and documenting their limitations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.289 | 0.528 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.021 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.055 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".