On Tables with Numbers, with Numbers
This addresses a cultural and ethical problem for the computational linguistics community, highlighting incremental concerns about research practices.
The paper critiques the reliance on numerical tables in computational linguistics, arguing they are epistemically irrelevant, environmentally harmful, and socially inequitable, based on a meta-analysis of research from the past decade.
This paper is a critical reflection on the epistemic culture of contemporary computational linguistics, framed in the context of its growing obsession with tables with numbers. We argue against tables with numbers on the basis of their epistemic irrelevance, their environmental impact, their role in enabling and exacerbating social inequalities, and their deep ties to commercial applications and profit-driven research. We substantiate our arguments with empirical evidence drawn from a meta-analysis of computational linguistics research over the last decade.