| name | emnlp-artifact-evaluation |
| description | Use when packaging the artifacts of an EMNLP paper — datasets, annotation guidelines, prompts, evaluation code, and model outputs — as anonymous review-time evidence or public post-acceptance releases, with licensing, data statements, and the inspection order NLP reviewers actually follow. |
EMNLP Artifact Evaluation
Use this for evidence packaging around an EMNLP submission. EMNLP has no separate
artifact-badging committee; the artifact is part of the scientific claim, filed under
the Responsible NLP checklist and inspected at reviewer discretion. In NLP the artifact
surface is unusually broad — data, labels, prompts, outputs, and scoring code are all
first-class — and each has its own failure mode.
What NLP reviewers open, in order
Reviewers with thirty minutes and suspicion follow a predictable path:
| Order | Artifact | What they are checking | Cheap failure |
|---|
| 1 | Data sample | Do instances look like the paper's description? | Examples contradict claimed label definitions |
| 2 | Prompt files | Do prompts match the paper's claimed setup? | Prompt contains hints the paper never mentioned |
| 3 | Scoring script | Is the metric computed the standard way? | Custom normalization inflates the headline metric |
| 4 | Annotation guidelines | Could these instructions produce these labels? | Guidelines answer a different question than the task |
| 5 | Output dumps | Are generations as good as the excerpted ones? | Body examples are the best 5 of 500 |
Package for this order: a top-level README that routes to each artifact in one hop, a
data sample small enough to open in a text editor, and prompts stored as files rather
than embedded in code.
Dataset packaging: the data statement standard
A released corpus travels with documentation or it travels badly:
- Provenance — where text came from, collection dates, and the license chain that
permits redistribution (scraped ≠ redistributable; say what you verified).
- Annotation record — who labeled (recruitment, qualifications, compensation),
under what guidelines (included verbatim), with what agreement (statistic and value),
and how disagreements were resolved.
- Composition — languages, domains, demographic scope of speakers and annotators
where relevant; the boundaries here feed the Limitations section directly.
- Intended use — the task the labels are valid for, and foreseeable misuses; a
toxicity corpus without a misuse note reads as naive in 2026.
- Splits and hygiene — split construction, dedup across splits, and any overlap
audit against common pretraining corpora.
Prompts and outputs as archival objects
Treat prompts like code and outputs like data:
artifacts/
├── prompts/
│ ├── task_nli_zeroshot_v3.txt # verbatim, one file per reported condition
│ └── CHANGELOG.md # v1→v3: what changed and which tables use which
├── outputs/
│ ├── model=llama3-8b_seed=42.jsonl # every generation behind every reported number
│ └── sample_100_stratified.jsonl # reviewer-sized random sample, stratified by error class
└── scoring/
└── score.py # reads outputs/, emits the paper's tables
The outputs/ directory is the underrated one: releasing full generations lets a
reviewer (and later, the field) re-score with better metrics without rerunning models —
the single highest-leverage reproducibility gift an NLP paper can give.
Review-time anonymity vs release-time findability
The same package lives two lives. At review: anonymized hosting, no usernames in paths,
no lab-identifying data sources, license files present but grant numbers absent. After
acceptance: permanent home, citable version (tag or DOI), README pointing at the
Anthology entry, model cards / data statements filled with the identity-bearing detail
review forbade. Build the package once with an anonymize.sh that strips the delta,
rather than maintaining two diverging trees.
Licensing without a legal department
The checklist asks about licenses in both directions — what you used and what you
release — and most failures are ignorance, not malice:
- Inbound: a benchmark's license travels with its derivatives; a corpus built by
filtering a research-only dataset cannot ship under a commercial-friendly license.
Record the license of every ingredient at collection time, because reconstructing
the chain in deadline week fails.
- Model outputs: generations from API models may carry terms-of-use restrictions
on redistribution and on training-data use; releasing an output corpus without
checking the provider's terms is the current decade's version of scraping-and-
hoping.
- Outbound: pick a standard license (CC for data, a common OSS license for code),
state it in the README and in the paper, and resist inventing bespoke "research
only, email us" terms that make the artifact uncitable in practice.
- People in the data: licensing does not settle privacy; text containing personal
information needs handling and redaction notes independent of copyright status.
Restricted and unreleasable material
When data cannot ship (privacy, license, platform terms): release the collection
pipeline and filters instead of the corpus; provide a synthetic or public-subset
sample demonstrating the format; state retention terms and whom to contact for
research access. For closed API models, ship exact prompts, dates, decoding
parameters, and full outputs — the model is closed; your measurement of it need not
be. The checklist rewards documented honesty over silent omission in every one of
these cases.
Versioning after release
An NLP artifact that succeeds gets used, and use creates obligations the paper never
mentioned:
- Tag the exact version the camera-ready numbers came from and never move that tag;
fixes go in new versions with a changelog explaining what results they might shift.
- When label errors are found post-release (they will be), publish errata in the
repository rather than silently rewriting files other papers already evaluated on —
benchmark drift breaks comparability for everyone downstream.
- Keep an issue tracker open; the questions users file are a free audit of your
documentation's gaps and occasionally of your paper's claims.
Output format
[Package role] review-time evidence / camera-ready release / both
[Inspection path] <README -> data sample -> prompts -> scoring -> outputs: intact?>
[Data statement] <provenance / annotation / composition / use / splits — gaps>
[Anonymity delta] <what anonymize.sh strips; leaks found>
[Unreleasable items] <artifact -> documented workaround>
