Social Good or Scientific Curiosity? Uncovering the Research Framing Behind NLP Artefacts

Eric Chamoun, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Clarifying the research framing of NLP artefacts (e.g., models, datasets, etc.) is crucial to aligning research with practical applications when researchers claim that their findings have real-world impact. Recent studies manually analyzed NLP research across domains, showing that few papers explicitly identify key stakeholders, intended uses, or appropriate contexts. In this work, we propose to automate this analysis, developing a three-component system that infers research framings by first extracting key elements (means, ends, stakeholders), then linking them through interpretable rules and contextual reasoning.We evaluate our approach on two domains: automated fact-checking using an existing dataset, and hate speech detection for which we annotate a new dataset—achieving consistent improvements over strong LLM baselines.Finally, we apply our system to recent automated fact-checking papers and uncover three notable trends: a rise in underspecified research goals, increased emphasis on scientific exploration over application, and a shift toward supporting human fact-checkers rather than pursuing full automation.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1286
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25310–25346
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1286/
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Cite (ACL):
Eric Chamoun, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, and Andreas Vlachos. 2025. Social Good or Scientific Curiosity? Uncovering the Research Framing Behind NLP Artefacts. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 25310–25346, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Social Good or Scientific Curiosity? Uncovering the Research Framing Behind NLP Artefacts (Chamoun et al., EMNLP 2025)
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