Lewis Watson


2023

pdf
Unveiling NLG Human-Evaluation Reproducibility: Lessons Learned and Key Insights from Participating in the ReproNLP Challenge
Lewis Watson | Dimitra Gkatzia
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems

Human evaluation is crucial for NLG systems as it provides a reliable assessment of the quality, effectiveness, and utility of generated language outputs. However, concerns about the reproducibility of such evaluations have emerged, casting doubt on the reliability and generalisability of reported results. In this paper, we present the findings of a reproducibility study on a data-to-text system, conducted under two conditions: (1) replicating the original setup as closely as possible with evaluators from AMT, and (2) replicating the original human evaluation but this time, utilising evaluators with a background in academia. Our experiments show that there is a loss of statistical significance between the original and reproduction studies, i.e. the human evaluation results are not reproducible. In addition, we found that employing local participants led to more robust results. We finally discuss lessons learned, addressing the challenges and best practices for ensuring reproducibility in NLG human evaluations.

pdf bib
Missing Information, Unresponsive Authors, Experimental Flaws: The Impossibility of Assessing the Reproducibility of Previous Human Evaluations in NLP
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 | Ondřej Dušek | Steffen Eger | Qixiang Fang | Mingqi Gao | Albert Gatt | Dimitra Gkatzia | Javier González-Corbelle | Dirk Hovy | Manuela Hürlimann | 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 | Ondřej Plátek | Verena Rieser | Jie Ruan | Joel Tetreault | Antonio Toral | Xiaojun Wan | Leo Wanner | Lewis Watson | Diyi Yang
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

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.