Papers Without Code: Availability of GitHub Repositories Linked in *CL Publications

Selina Meyer, Michael Roth

Source code and data published at computational linguistics (*CL) venues are increasingly being shared via GitHub. While this generally is a favourable development for the accessibility and potential reusability of research artifacts in natural language processing (NLP), the long-term availability of such repositories has not been evaluated. In this squib, we discuss the availability of repositories linked in papers published in the Computational Linguistics (CL) journal as well as at ACL and its co-located events over the past ten years. Contrary to our expectations, we find that GitHub repositories linked in more recent ACL publications are unavailable at similar rates as in older publications, in parts due to an increase in empty and placeholder repositories. Similar trends hold for other *CL venues, but not for platforms other than GitHub.