Is the ACL Responsible NLP Checklist a Box-Ticking Exercise? A Large-Scale Analysis of EMNLP 2025

arXiv:2608.09280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Responsible NLP practice includes a) transparency, b) ethics, and c) societal impacts. The Responsible NLP Checklist aims to push these goals, and promote responsible practice. Recently, ACL released the EMNLP 2025 Checklists to aid transparency on the current research practice, which we focus on. We curate and release the first two datasets of: a) all the checklist responses and justifications from the EMNLP 2025 Main and Finding tracks; b) checklist reference linking to paper sections. We also provide the first analysis of recent EMNLP Checklists, by examining 73,922 responses and justifications to them. For the Main track, we find that authors isolate ethics questions of the Checklist from the paper's bulk, mimicking the trend of ethics being an afterthought. We then examine exttt{NO} responses. We find 44.9% of justifications are poor or bad-faith, being brief or empty. Then, we find significant issues with the checklist design and effort of authors, namely that 6% of all checklists contained logical contradictions between parent and child responses. We also find evidence of surface compliance for responsible ethics, with 53% authors dismissing potential risks or social impacts of their work, for which there should be none. We compare this to the Findings track, noticing a similar trend in both tracks. Lastly, we discuss the implications of the checklist design and provide recommendations for future checklist iterations. Including: a) enforcing a minimum word count, b) enforcing more scrutiny on the risks of appliances.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-11