Human-Centered Evaluation of Language Technologies

Su Lin Blodgett, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Vera Liao, Ziang Xiao


Abstract
Evaluation is a cornerstone topic in NLP. However, many criticisms have been raised about the community’s evaluation practices, including a lack of human-centered considerations about people’s needs for language technologies and their actual impact on people. This “evaluation crisis” is exacerbated by the recent development of large generative models with diverse and uncertain capabilities. This tutorial aims to inspire more human-centered evaluation in NLP by introducing perspectives and methodologies from human-computer interaction (HCI), a field concerned primarily with the design and evaluation of technologies. The tutorial will start with an overview of current NLP evaluation practices and their limitations, then introduce the “toolbox of evaluation methods” from HCI with varying considerations such as what to evaluate for, how generalizable the results are to the real-world contexts, and pragmatic costs to conduct the evaluation. The tutorial will also encourage reflection on how these HCI perspectives and methodologies can complement NLP evaluation through Q&A discussions and a hands-on exercise.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-tutorials.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
39–43
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-tutorials.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Su Lin Blodgett, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Vera Liao, and Ziang Xiao. 2024. Human-Centered Evaluation of Language Technologies. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts, pages 39–43, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Human-Centered Evaluation of Language Technologies (Blodgett et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-tutorials.6.pdf