A Major Obstacle for NLP Research: Let’s Talk about Time Allocation!

Katharina Kann, Shiran Dudy, Arya D. McCarthy


Abstract
The field of natural language processing (NLP) has grown over the last few years: conferences have become larger, we have published an incredible amount of papers, and state-of-the-art research has been implemented in a large variety of customer-facing products. However, this paper argues that we have been less successful than we should have been and reflects on where and how the field fails to tap its full potential. Specifically, we demonstrate that, in recent years, subpar time allocation has been a major obstacle for NLP research. We outline multiple concrete problems together with their negative consequences and, importantly, suggest remedies to improve the status quo. We hope that this paper will be a starting point for discussions around which common practices are – or are not – beneficial for NLP research.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.612
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8959–8969
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/declare-journal/2022.emnlp-main.612/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.612
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Katharina Kann, Shiran Dudy, and Arya D. McCarthy. 2022. A Major Obstacle for NLP Research: Let’s Talk about Time Allocation!. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8959–8969, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Major Obstacle for NLP Research: Let’s Talk about Time Allocation! (Kann et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/declare-journal/2022.emnlp-main.612.pdf