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Missing Information, Unresponsive Authors, Experimental Flaws: The Impossibility of Assessing the Reproducibility of Previous Human Evaluations in NLP

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abstract

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.

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cs.CR 1

years

2025 1

verdicts

CONDITIONAL 1

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Private, Verifiable, and Auditable AI Systems

cs.CR · 2025-08-27 · conditional · novelty 4.0

A thesis demonstrating partial prototypes for zk-verifiable model evaluation and privacy-preserving retrieval, and arguing these pieces can compose into end-to-end auditable AI systems.

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  • Private, Verifiable, and Auditable AI Systems cs.CR · 2025-08-27 · conditional · none · ref 24 · internal anchor

    A thesis demonstrating partial prototypes for zk-verifiable model evaluation and privacy-preserving retrieval, and arguing these pieces can compose into end-to-end auditable AI systems.