Is NLP Ready for Standardization?

Lauriane Aufrant


Abstract
While standardization is a well-established activity in other scientific fields such as telecommunications, networks or multimedia, in the field of AI and more specifically NLP it is still at its dawn. In this paper, we explore how various aspects of NLP (evaluation, data, tasks...) lack standards and how that can impact science, but also the society, the industry, and regulations. We argue that the numerous initiatives to rationalize the field and establish good practices are only the first step, and developing formal standards remains needed to bring further clarity to NLP research and industry, at a time where this community faces various crises regarding ethics or reproducibility. We thus encourage NLP researchers to contribute to existing and upcoming standardization projects, so that they can express their needs and concerns, while sharing their expertise.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.202
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2785–2800
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.202
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.202
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lauriane Aufrant. 2022. Is NLP Ready for Standardization?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 2785–2800, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is NLP Ready for Standardization? (Aufrant, Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.202.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.202.mp4