Illusions of the Gold Standard: A Large-scale Analysis of Human Evaluation Protocols for Long-form Text Generation
Human evaluation plays a critical role in assessing the quality of generated text. However, the reliability and reproducibility of these evaluations depend on transparent and well-documented protocols -- details that are frequently missing in current practice. In this work, we conduct a large-scale analysis of human evaluation protocols for evaluating long-form generation tasks in *CL conference publications from 2023--2025, including a full manual review of 284 papers and LLM-assisted analysis for another 1.8k+ papers. We define a set of 20 reportable criteria related to reproducibility of human evaluation studies, and apply these criteria to systematically examine reporting norms and pr...
| Authors | Katelyn Xiaoying Mei, Yi-Li Hsu, Minjoon Choi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 June 2026 |
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