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Do we Still Need Gold Standards for Evaluation?

The availability of a huge mass of textual data in electronic format has increased the need for fast and accurate techniques for textual data processing. Machine learning and statistical approaches have been increasingly used in NLP since a decade, mainly because they are quick, versatile and efficient. However, despite this evolution of the field, evaluation still rely (most of the time) on a comparison between the output of a probabilistic or statistical system on the one hand, and a non-statistic, most of the time hand-crafted, gold standard on the other hand. In this paper, we take the example of the acquisition of subcategorization frames from corpora as a practical example. Our study is motivated by the fact that, even if a gold standard is an invaluable resource for evaluation, a gold standard is always partial and does not really show how accurate and useful results are.