Sarah Rajtmajer (@srajtmajer.bsky.social)

🚨New paper!!🚨 I LOVE this little paper and so happy @fanchyna.bsky.social suggest we write it. "What Are Research Hypotheses?"....folks in NLP use the word hypothesis in ways which really depart from its roots arxiv.org/abs/2509.00185 @briannosek.bsky.social... would love your feedback!

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What Are Research Hypotheses? Over the past decades, alongside advancements in natural language processing, significant attention has been paid to training models to automatically extract, understand, test, and generate hypotheses in open and scientific domains. However, interpretations of the term \emph{hypothesis} for various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks have migrated from traditional definitions in the natural, social, and formal sciences. Even within NLU, we observe differences defining hypotheses across literature. In this paper, we overview and delineate various definitions of hypothesis. Especially, we discern the nuances of definitions across recently published NLU tasks. We highlight the importance of well-structured and well-defined hypotheses, particularly as we move toward a machine-interpretable scholarly record. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00185