Show Your Work: Improved Reporting of Experimental Results

Jesse Dodge, Suchin Gururangan, Dallas Card, Roy Schwartz, Noah A. Smith


Abstract
Research in natural language processing proceeds, in part, by demonstrating that new models achieve superior performance (e.g., accuracy) on held-out test data, compared to previous results. In this paper, we demonstrate that test-set performance scores alone are insufficient for drawing accurate conclusions about which model performs best. We argue for reporting additional details, especially performance on validation data obtained during model development. We present a novel technique for doing so: expected validation performance of the best-found model as a function of computation budget (i.e., the number of hyperparameter search trials or the overall training time). Using our approach, we find multiple recent model comparisons where authors would have reached a different conclusion if they had used more (or less) computation. Our approach also allows us to estimate the amount of computation required to obtain a given accuracy; applying it to several recently published results yields massive variation across papers, from hours to weeks. We conclude with a set of best practices for reporting experimental results which allow for robust future comparisons, and provide code to allow researchers to use our technique.
Anthology ID:
D19-1224
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2185–2194
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1224
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1224
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jesse Dodge, Suchin Gururangan, Dallas Card, Roy Schwartz, and Noah A. Smith. 2019. Show Your Work: Improved Reporting of Experimental Results. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2185–2194, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Show Your Work: Improved Reporting of Experimental Results (Dodge et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1224.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1224.Attachment.zip
Code
 allenai/allentune +  additional community code
Data
GLUESQuADSST