  It has become a common pattern in our field: One group introduces a language
task, exemplified by a dataset, which they argue is challenging enough to serve
as a benchmark. They also provide a baseline model for it, which then soon is
improved upon by other groups. Often, research efforts then move on, and the
pattern repeats itself. What is typically left implicit is the argumentation
for why this constitutes progress, and progress towards what. In this paper, we
try to step back for a moment from this pattern and work out possible
argumentations and their parts.

Computation and Language