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Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP

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Kiela, Douwe, Bartolo, Max, Nie, Yixin, Kaushik, Divyansh, Geiger, Atticus, Wu, Zhengxuan, Vidgen, Bertie, Prasad, Grusha +11 more·2021·Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Abstract

Douwe Kiela, Max Bartolo, Yixin Nie, Divyansh Kaushik, Atticus Geiger, Zhengxuan Wu, Bertie Vidgen, Grusha Prasad, Amanpreet Singh, Pratik Ringshia, Zhiyi Ma, Tristan Thrush, Sebastian Riedel, Zeerak Waseem, Pontus Stenetorp, Robin Jia, Mohit Bansal, Christopher Potts, Adina Williams. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

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Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.324

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  • Datasets are central to evaluating language models' generative capabilities in NLP.

    “Datasets are central to evaluating LMs' generative capabilities in NLP [12,25,28,32,49,55].”

    From CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities (2022) · cites this paper as [32]

    The Background (p. 2) says task-level datasets have traditionally been used to measure progress in NLP, supporting the general point about datasets and evaluation. But Caveats and Objections (p. 8) says Dynabench currently focuses on classification and span extraction, while evaluating generative tasks requires further research. The paper therefore does not establish the claim specifically about evaluating language models’ generative capabilities. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • These benchmarks are limited to single-turn or short-context scenarios, do not require sequential decision-making or adaptation to changing environments and have been saturating rapidly.

    “These benchmarks, however, are limited to single-turn or short-context scenarios, do not require sequential decision-making or adaptation to changing environments and have been saturating rapidly”

    From BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games (2024) · cites this paper as Kiela et al., 2021

    The Introduction (p. 1) says newer benchmarks routinely reach estimated human performance within a few years, supporting the rapid-saturation point. The discussion of initial tasks (p. 5) describes a constrained question-answering setting and plans for longer passages, but our copy does not establish that benchmarks generally are single-turn or short-context, or that they do not require sequential decision-making or adaptation to changing environments. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • DynaBench addresses the challenges posed by static standardized benchmarks, such as saturation and overfitting, by emphasizing dynamic data with human-in-the-loop.

    “DynaBench addresses the challenges posed by static standardized benchmarks, such as saturation and overfitting, by emphasizing dynamic data with human-in-the-loop.”

    From Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena (2023) · cites this paper as [21]

    The Introduction (p. 1) presents Dynabench as dynamic data collection with humans and models in the loop, in contrast to static benchmarking. Caveats and Objections (p. 8) explicitly says it anticipates dataset saturation. The copy does not identify overfitting as a challenge of static benchmarks; its discussion of annotators ‘overfitting’ on models (p. 7) describes a potential risk of the dynamic approach instead. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Datasets have long been useful for evaluating language models in natural language processing research.

    “Datasets have long been useful in evaluating LMs in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research [25,32,47,56].”
  • Existing benchmarks have become saturated and fail to capture the frontier of what state-of-the-art LMs can and cannot do.

    “At the same time, existing benchmarks have become saturated (Kiela et al., 2021; Ott et al., 2022) and fail to capture the frontier of what state-of-the-art LMs can and cannot do.”

    From SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues? (2023) · cites this paper as Kiela et al., 2021

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6 of the 115 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Michael Chen, Mike D'Arcy, Alisa Liu, Jared Fernandez, and Doug Downey. 2019. CODAH: An adversarially-authored question answering dataset for common sense. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Evaluating Vector Space Representations for NLP , pages 63-69, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  2. Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. 2019. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog , 1(8):9.
  3. Victor Sánchez Valencia. 1991. Studies on natural logic and categorial grammar, University of Amsterdam Ph. D . Ph.D. thesis, thesis.
  4. Bertie Vidgen and Leon Derczynski. 2020. Directions in Abusive Language Training Data: Garbage In, Garbage Out. arXiv:2004.01670 , pages 1-26. · arXiv

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Authors
Kiela, D., Bartolo, M., Nie, Y., Kaushik, D., Geiger, A., Wu, Z., Vidgen, B., Prasad, G., Singh, A., Ringshia, P., Ma, Z., Thrush, T., Riedel, S., Waseem, Z., Stenetorp, P., Jia, R., Bansal, M., Potts, C., & Williams, A.
Affiliations
Meta (United Kingdom) (GB)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Published
2021
Pages
4110-4124
OpenAlex
W3157225713
Cited by
254
References
115
Citations by year
2026: 34 · 2025: 29 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 71 · 2022: 58 · 2021: 25
FWCI
21.87
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N66001, N66001-19-2-4031, N66001-19)
  • Office of Naval Research (N000141812871, N00014-18, ONR-N00014, N00014)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
Keywords
benchmarking, natural language processing, benchmark design, evaluation metrics

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