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EMNLP Findings2022

Experimental Standards for Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing Research

Dennis Ulmer, Elisa Bassignana, Max Müller-Eberstein, Daniel Varab, Mike Zhang, Rob van der Goot, Christian Hardmeier, Barbara Plank

Abstract

The field of Deep Learning (DL) has undergone explosive growth during the last decade, with a substantial impact on Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well. Yet, compared to more established disciplines, a lack of common experimental standards remains an open challenge to the field at large. Starting from fundamental scientific principles, we distill ongoing discussions on experimental standards in NLP into a single, widelyapplicable methodology. Following these best practices is crucial to strengthen experimental evidence, improve reproducibility and support scientific progress. These standards are further collected in a public repository to help them transparently adapt to future needs.

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Cited by top-tier papers2

  1. Statistical Uncertainty in Word Embeddings: GloVe-VAndrea Vallebueno, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Christopher D. Manning, Daniel E. HoEMNLP 2024 · 3 citations
  2. On the Effect of Hyperparameters in Language Modeling for Computational LinguisticsRuoxi Ning, Yongpeng Zhu, Qingcheng Zeng, Tatsuki Kuribayashi et al.ACL 2026

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  4. Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical PrecipiceRishabh Agarwal, Max Schwarzer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Aaron C. Courville et al.NeurIPS 2021 · 1,067 citations
  5. Understanding the failure modes of out-of-distribution generalizationVaishnavh Nagarajan, Anders Andreassen, Behnam NeyshaburICLR 2021 · 205 citations

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