33.1796, FYI: Call for Participation in the NLP Community Metasurvey

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1796. Thu May 19 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.1796, FYI: Call for Participation in the NLP Community Metasurvey

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Date: Thu, 19 May 2022 18:12:12
From: Julian Michael [nlp-metasurvey-admin at nyu.edu]
Subject: Call for Participation in the NLP Community Metasurvey

 
What do NLPers think about controversial NLP issues? And perhaps more
interestingly: What do NLPers think other NLPers think about controversial NLP
issues?

TL;DR: We invite you to take a (~20 minute) survey that not only gauges the
beliefs of the NLP community on actively debated ideas and positions, but also
asks: How does the NLP community view itself?

For the first 1,000 respondents, we will donate $10 to a non-profit that you
can choose at the end of the survey.

Take the survey » https://nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5iECGAxs8SnufSm

Recent rapid changes in the NLP landscape have raised many questions. For
example:
* Are we devoting too many resources to scaling up?
* Do language models understand language? Will they ever?
* Is the traditional paradigm of model benchmarking still tenable?
* What kinds of predictive models are ethical for researchers to build and
release?
* Will most influential advances come from industry or academic labs over the
next 10 years?

On these and similar questions, it’s often unclear what counts as general
consensus, what is still actively debated, or what is widely considered
overturned. We believe it would benefit the field to have a better
understanding of the current landscape of community opinions and beliefs.

To this end, we urge researchers in computational linguistics and natural
language processing to take the NLP Community Metasurvey. This survey covers
more than 30 potentially controversial positions, asking not only whether you
agree, but what percentage of the community you think agrees with the
position, thus exposing the difference between "what people think" and "what
people think people think." This idea was inspired by the PhilPapers Surveys
(http://philpapers.org/surveys).

The results and analysis will be descriptive, not prescriptive, as such issues
cannot be resolved by majority vote. By necessity, we are covering a
subjective and biased subset of questions and reducing many complex issues
into simplified scales, but we hope that the outcome can serve as a reference
point for community discussion and for future surveys. This is not the final
word in any debate, but we hope it will spark new discussions as an initial
study of the range of positions people hold and ways in which the community
may mis-model itself.

The results will be written up in a report and visualizations of the data will
be made accessible online (suitably aggregated to prevent deanonymization) at
https://nlpsurvey.net.

We hope to cover as much of our large and growing community as possible, so
please participate! We also encourage you to share it in other NLP/CL spaces
like email lists, school or lab Slack groups, and Twitter.

Thanks for taking part in something we hope will help us all understand our
community better!
—The NLP Community Metasurvey Team

More information at https://nlpsurvey.net
 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics





 



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