What Limits Us? Analyzing Self-Reported Limitations in NLP Research
TL;DR
A large-scale analysis of the Limitations sections from ACL and EMNLP papers published between 2020 and 2025 to understand what researchers disclose about their own work is conducted, and a novel human-AI framework for iterative hybrid qualitative coding is implemented.
Abstract
Since late 2022, a Limitations section has become mandatory at many top-tier NLP conferences. The growing number of accepted papers at these venues has resulted in a vast corpus of self-reported limitations that cannot all be manually reviewed, yet remains systematically unanalyzed. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct a large-scale analysis of the Limitations sections from ACL and EMNLP papers published between 2020 and 2025 to understand what researchers disclose about their own work. To do so, we implement a novel human-AI framework for iterative hybrid qualitative coding. This framework enables us to investigate trends in self-reported limitations over time, their correlations with specific paper attributes, and the writing patterns that recur around these disclosures. Our findings offer a critical reflection on the diverse reported challenges as well as the self-reporting practices of researchers in the NLP community.
