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Mind the Gap between the Application Track and the Real World

Ananya Ganesh, Jie Cao, E. Margaret Perkoff, Rosy Southwell, Martha Palmer, Katharina Kann


Abstract
Recent advances in NLP have led to a rise in inter-disciplinary and application-oriented research. While this demonstrates the growing real-world impact of the field, research papers frequently feature experiments that do not account for the complexities of realistic data and environments. To explore the extent of this gap, we investigate the relationship between the real-world motivations described in NLP papers and the models and evaluation which comprise the proposed solution. We first survey papers from the NLP Applications track from ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2020, asking which papers have differences between their stated motivation and their experimental setting, and if so, mention them. We find that many papers fall short of considering real-world input and output conditions due to adopting simplified modeling or evaluation settings. As a case study, we then empirically show that the performance of an educational dialog understanding system deteriorates when used in a realistic classroom environment.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.156
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1833–1842
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.156
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.156
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ananya Ganesh, Jie Cao, E. Margaret Perkoff, Rosy Southwell, Martha Palmer, and Katharina Kann. 2023. Mind the Gap between the Application Track and the Real World. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1833–1842, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mind the Gap between the Application Track and the Real World (Ganesh et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.156.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.156.mp4