Simone Tedeschi, Johan Bos, Thierry Declerck, Jan Hajič, Daniel Hershcovich, Eduard Hovy, Alexander Koller, Simon Krek, Steven Schockaert, Rico Sennrich, Ekaterina Shutova, Roberto Navigli
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on developing larger pretrained language models and introducing benchmarks such as SuperGLUE and SQuAD to measure their abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use benchmarks such as SuperGLUE and SQUAD to evaluate PLMs' abilities in language understanding, reasoning, and reading comprehension to assess their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks have serious limitations affecting comparison between humans and PLMs and provide recommendations for fairer and more transparent benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) have achieved superhuman performance on many benchmarks, creating a need for harder tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that measures natural language understanding (NLU) abilities of pretrained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures the ability of pretrained language models to perform on many tasks. |
On “Human Parity” and “Super Human Performance” in Machine Translation Evaluation (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we reassess claims of human parity and super human performance in machine translation. |
| Approach: | They reassess claims of human parity and super human performance in machine translation . they argue that human translation involves much more than what is embedded in automatic systems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed results show that human translation involves much more than what is embedded in automatic systems. |
MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI (2023.emnlp-main)
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Kabir Ahuja, Harshita Diddee, Rishav Hada, Millicent Ochieng, Krithika Ramesh, Prachi Jain, Akshay Nambi, Tanuja Ganu, Sameer Segal, Mohamed Ahmed, Kalika Bali, Sunayana Sitaram
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What Will it Take to Fix Benchmarking in Natural Language Understanding? (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Evaluation for many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks is broken due to unreliable and biased systems scoring so high on standard benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They argue that current benchmarks fail at four criteria for evaluation . they argue that adversarial data collection does not address the causes of failures . |
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In Benchmarks We Trust ... Or Not? (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ine Gevers, Victor De Marez, Jens Van Nooten, Jens Lemmens, Andriy Kosar, Ehsan Lotfi, Nikolay Banar, Pieter Fivez, Luna De Bruyne, Walter Daelemans
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) are inadequate and lack a clear solution. |
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Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a priori, large neural language models are described as understanding or capturing meaning on tasks that are ostensibly meaningsensitive. |
| Approach: | They argue that a system trained only on form has no way to learn meaning . they argue that this is due to a misunderstanding of the relationship between form and meaning - which is a misconception in NLP . |
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Benchmarking Large Language Model Capabilities for Conditional Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive and pre-trained large language models have shifted the field from application-specific to generation-based approaches. |
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The BiGGen Bench: A Principled Benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Language Models with Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Seungone Kim, Juyoung Suk, Ji Yong Cho, Shayne Longpre, Chaeeun Kim, Dongkeun Yoon, Guijin Son, Yejin Cho, Sheikh Shafayat, Jinheon Baek, Sue Hyun Park, Hyeonbin Hwang, Jinkyung Jo, Hyowon Cho, Haebin Shin, Seongyun Lee, Hanseok Oh, Noah Lee, Namgyu Ho, Se June Joo, Miyoung Ko, Yoonjoo Lee, Hyungjoo Chae, Jamin Shin, Joel Jang, Seonghyeon Ye, Bill Yuchen Lin, Sean Welleck, Graham Neubig, Moontae Lee, Kyungjae Lee, Minjoon Seo
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| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates nine distinct capabilities of language models across 77 tasks. |
All That’s ‘Human’ Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | evaluators distinguish between human- and machine-authored text in three domains without training . evals' accuracy improved up to 55%, but it did not significantly improve across the three domain. |
| Approach: | They examine the role untrained human evaluations play in NLG evaluation and propose ways to improve their evaluations. |
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Defining a New NLP Playground (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Sha Li, Chi Han, Pengfei Yu, Carl Edwards, Manling Li, Xingyao Wang, Yi Fung, Charles Yu, Joel Tetreault, Eduard Hovy, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Recent explosion of performance of large language models (LLMs) has changed the field more abruptly and seismically than any other shift in the field’s 80 year history. |
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