The Validity of Evaluation Results: Assessing Concurrence Across Compositionality Benchmarks

Kaiser Sun, Adina Williams, Dieuwke Hupkes


Abstract
NLP models have progressed drastically in recent years, according to numerous datasets proposed to evaluate performance. Questions remain, however, about how particular dataset design choices may impact the conclusions we draw about model capabilities. In this work, we investigate this question in the domain of compositional generalization. We examine the performance of six modeling approaches across 4 datasets, split according to 8 compositional splitting strategies, ranking models by 18 compositional generalization splits in total. Our results show that: i) the datasets, although all designed to evaluate compositional generalization, rank modeling approaches differently; ii) datasets generated by humans align better with each other than with synthetic datasets, or than the latter among themselves; iii) generally, whether datasets are sampled from the same source is more predictive of the resulting model ranking than whether they maintain the same interpretation of compositionality; and iv) specific lexical items in dataset impacts the measurement consistency. Overall, our results demonstrate that much work remains to be done when it comes to assessing whether popular evaluation datasets measure what they intend to measure, and suggests that elucidating more rigorous standards for establishing the validity of evaluation sets could benefit the field.
Anthology ID:
2023.conll-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Jing Jiang, David Reitter, Shumin Deng
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
274–293
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.conll-1.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.conll-1.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaiser Sun, Adina Williams, and Dieuwke Hupkes. 2023. The Validity of Evaluation Results: Assessing Concurrence Across Compositionality Benchmarks. In Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 274–293, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Validity of Evaluation Results: Assessing Concurrence Across Compositionality Benchmarks (Sun et al., CoNLL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.conll-1.19.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.conll-1.19.mp4