What Are Research Hypotheses?

Abstract

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.