Showing Your Work Doesn’t Always Work
Raphael Tang, Jaejun Lee, Ji Xin, Xinyu Liu, Yaoliang Yu, Jimmy Lin
Abstract
In natural language processing, a recently popular line of work explores how to best report the experimental results of neural networks. One exemplar publication, titled “Show Your Work: Improved Reporting of Experimental Results” (Dodge et al., 2019), advocates for reporting the expected validation effectiveness of the best-tuned model, with respect to the computational budget. In the present work, we critically examine this paper. As far as statistical generalizability is concerned, we find unspoken pitfalls and caveats with this approach. We analytically show that their estimator is biased and uses error-prone assumptions. We find that the estimator favors negative errors and yields poor bootstrapped confidence intervals. We derive an unbiased alternative and bolster our claims with empirical evidence from statistical simulation. Our codebase is at https://github.com/castorini/meanmax.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.246
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2766–2772
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.246
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.246
- Cite (ACL):
- Raphael Tang, Jaejun Lee, Ji Xin, Xinyu Liu, Yaoliang Yu, and Jimmy Lin. 2020. Showing Your Work Doesn’t Always Work. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2766–2772, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Showing Your Work Doesn’t Always Work (Tang et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.acl-main.246.pdf
- Code
- castorini/meanmax