We present the results of the NLP Community Metasurvey. Run from May to June 2022, the survey elicited opinions on controversial issues, including industry influence in the field, concerns about AGI, and ethics. Our results put concrete numbers to several controversies: For example, respondents are split almost exactly in half on questions about the importance of artificial general intelligence, whether language models understand language, and the necessity of linguistic structure and inductive bias for solving NLP problems. In addition, the survey posed meta-questions, asking respondents to predict the distribution of survey responses. This allows us not only to gain insight on the spectrum of beliefs held by NLP researchers, but also to uncover false sociological beliefs where the community's predictions don't match reality. We find such mismatches on a wide range of issues. Among other results, the community greatly overestimates its own belief in the usefulness of benchmarks and the potential for scaling to solve real-world problems, while underestimating its own belief in the importance of linguistic structure, inductive bias, and interdisciplinary science.

本文介绍了NLP社区元调查的结果，涉及人工智能、道德伦理等多方面的问题，结果表明，对于人工智能的重要性、语言模型对语言的理解、语言结构以及归纳偏差对于解决NLP问题的必要性等问题，调查结果分歧较大，同时发现社区对于基准的有用性和扩展能力以及解决实际问题的潜力的看法高估，而低估了语言结构、归纳偏差和跨学科科学的重要性。

NLP研究者的信仰是什么？NLP社区元调查结果