# Teaching and Critiquing Conceptualization and Operationalization in NLP

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18505 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18505/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [Attention is not not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04626/) (2019)
- [Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15004/) (2023)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07997/) (2021)
- [Reasoning or Reciting? Exploring the Capabilities and Limitations of Language Models Through Counterfactual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02477/) (2023)
- [Patchscopes: A Unifying Framework for Inspecting Hidden Representations of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06102/) (2024)
- [What Will it Take to Fix Benchmarking in Natural Language Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02145/) (2021)
- [The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15590/) (2021)
- [Intrinsic Bias Metrics Do Not Correlate with Application Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15859/) (2020)
- [The elephant in the interpretability room: Why use attention as explanation when we have saliency methods?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05607/) (2020)
- [Are Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models just In-Context Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01809/) (2023)
- [State-of-the-art generalisation research in NLP: A taxonomy and review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03050/) (2022)
- [Explainable AI: Beware of Inmates Running the Asylum Or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Social and Behavioural Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00547/) (2017)
- [RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17700/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11410/) (2021)
- [Don't Blame the Annotator: Bias Already Starts in the Annotation Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00415/) (2022)
- [Do Emergent Abilities Exist in Quantized Large Language Models: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08072/) (2023)
- [How Large Language Models are Transforming Machine-Paraphrased Plagiarism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03568/) (2022)
- [Disembodied Machine Learning: On the Illusion of Objectivity in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11974/) (2021)
- [Evaluation of African American Language Bias in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14291/) (2023)
- [On Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Biases in Multilingual Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01503/) (2023)
- [Stereotypes and Smut: The (Mis)representation of Non-cisgender Identities by Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17072/) (2023)
- [It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09022/) (2023)
- [Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16660/) (2025)
- [Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17159/) (2024)
- [Robust Pronoun Fidelity with English LLMs: Are they Reasoning, Repeating, or Just Biased?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03134/) (2024)
- [Nichelle and Nancy: The Influence of Demographic Attributes and Tokenization Length on First Name Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16577/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

NLP researchers regularly invoke abstract concepts like "interpretability," "bias," "reasoning," and "stereotypes," without defining them. Each subfield has a shared understanding or conceptualization of what these terms mean and how we should treat them, and this shared understanding is the basis on which operational decisions are made: Datasets are built to evaluate these concepts, metrics are proposed to quantify them, and claims are made about systems. But what do they mean, what should they mean, and how should we measure them? I outline a seminar I created for students to explore these questions of conceptualization and operationalization, with an interdisciplinary reading list and an emphasis on discussion and critique.