The QCET Taxonomy of Standard Quality Criterion Names and Definitions for the Evaluation of NLP Systems

Prior work has shown that two NLP evaluation experiments that report results for the same quality criterion name (e.g. Fluency) do not necessarily evaluate the same aspect of quality, and the comparability implied by the name can be misleading. Not knowing when two evaluations are comparable in this sense means we currently lack the ability to draw reliable conclusions about system quality on the basis of multiple, independently conducted evaluations. This in turn hampers the ability of the field to progress scientifically as a whole, a pervasive issue in NLP since its beginning (Sparck Jones, 1981). It is hard to see how the issue of unclear comparability can be fully addressed other than by the creation of a standard set of quality criterion names and definitions that the several hundred quality criterion names actually in use in the field can be mapped to, and grounded in. Taking a strictly descriptive approach, the QCET Quality Criteria for Evaluation Taxonomy derives a standard set of quality criterion names and definitions from three surveys of evaluations reported in NLP, and structures them into a hierarchy where each parent node captures common aspects of its child nodes. We present QCET and the resources it consists of, and discuss its three main uses in (i) establishing comparability of existing evaluations, (ii) guiding the design of new evaluations, and (iii) assessing regulatory compliance.