We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact

Ehud Reiter

doi:10.1162/coli.a.18

We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact

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Abstract

The ACL community has very little interest in evaluating the real-world impact of NLP systems. A structured survey of the ACL Anthology shows that perhaps 0.1% of its papers contain such evaluations; furthermore most papers that include impact evaluations present them very sketchily and instead focus on metric evaluations. NLP technology would be more useful and more quickly adopted if we seriously tried to understand and evaluate its real-world impact.

Anthology ID:: 2025.cl-4.10
Volume:: Computational Linguistics, Volume 51, Issue 4 - December 2025
Month:: December
Year:: 2025
Address:: Cambridge, MA
Venue:: CL
SIG:
Publisher:: MIT Press
Note:
Pages:: 1419–1431
Language:
URL:: https://aclanthology.org/2025.cl-4.10/
DOI:: 10.1162/coli.a.18
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):: Ehud Reiter. 2025. We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact. Computational Linguistics, 51(4):1419–1431.
Cite (Informal):: We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact (Reiter, CL 2025)
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PDF:: https://aclanthology.org/2025.cl-4.10.pdf

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@article{reiter-2025-evaluate,
    title = "We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact",
    author = "Reiter, Ehud",
    journal = "Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "51",
    number = "4",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.cl-4.10/",
    doi = "10.1162/coli.a.18",
    pages = "1419--1431",
    abstract = "The ACL community has very little interest in evaluating the real-world impact of NLP systems. A structured survey of the ACL Anthology shows that perhaps 0.1{\%} of its papers contain such evaluations; furthermore most papers that include impact evaluations present them very sketchily and instead focus on metric evaluations. NLP technology would be more useful and more quickly adopted if we seriously tried to understand and evaluate its real-world impact."
}

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    <abstract>The ACL community has very little interest in evaluating the real-world impact of NLP systems. A structured survey of the ACL Anthology shows that perhaps 0.1% of its papers contain such evaluations; furthermore most papers that include impact evaluations present them very sketchily and instead focus on metric evaluations. NLP technology would be more useful and more quickly adopted if we seriously tried to understand and evaluate its real-world impact.</abstract>
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%0 Journal Article
%T We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact
%A Reiter, Ehud
%J Computational Linguistics
%D 2025
%8 December
%V 51
%N 4
%I MIT Press
%C Cambridge, MA
%F reiter-2025-evaluate
%X The ACL community has very little interest in evaluating the real-world impact of NLP systems. A structured survey of the ACL Anthology shows that perhaps 0.1% of its papers contain such evaluations; furthermore most papers that include impact evaluations present them very sketchily and instead focus on metric evaluations. NLP technology would be more useful and more quickly adopted if we seriously tried to understand and evaluate its real-world impact.
%R 10.1162/coli.a.18
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.cl-4.10/
%U https://doi.org/10.1162/coli.a.18
%P 1419-1431

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Markdown (Informal)

[We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact](https://aclanthology.org/2025.cl-4.10/) (Reiter, CL 2025)

We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact (Reiter, CL 2025)

ACL

Ehud Reiter. 2025. We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact. Computational Linguistics, 51(4):1419–1431.