A Two-Sided Discussion of Preregistration of NLP Research

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Van Miltenburg et al. (2021) suggest NLP research should adopt preregistration to prevent fishing expeditions and to promote publication of negative results. At face value, this is a very reasonable suggestion, seemingly solving many methodological problems with NLP research. We discuss pros and cons-some old, some new: a) Preregistration is challenged by the practice of retrieving hypotheses after the results are known; b) preregistration may bias NLP toward confirmatory research; c) preregistration must allow for reclassification of research as exploratory; d) preregistration may increase publication bias; e) preregistration may increase flag-planting; f) preregistration may increase p-hacking; and finally, g) preregistration may make us less risk tolerant. We cast our discussion as a dialogue, presenting both sides of the debate.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEACL 2023 - 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2023
Pages83-93
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429449
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2023 - Dubrovnik, Croatia
Duration: 2 May 20236 May 2023

Conference

Conference17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2023
LandCroatia
ByDubrovnik
Periode02/05/202306/05/2023
SponsorAdobe, Babelscape, Bloomberg Engineering, Duolingo, Liveperson

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

ID: 356885601