Evaluation Contracts and Evaluation Leverage: Sliced-Gap Readings in Structured Prediction Can Move Without Model Change

Hao Lu, Weixing Zhu, Ruiyang Li

NLP evaluation reports routinely cite sliced performance differences, most prominently the intra-inter gap in document-level relation extraction, as capability evidence. We show that such gap readings are joint properties of models and evaluation contracts: scoring function, gold version, threshold, output format, and prompt language. With predictions frozen, a method ordering reverses under a gold-standard exchange (+0.0363, CI excluding zero; tie-level after), movement localizing where gold re-partitions: renames are gauge transformations (Delta=0; re-annotation +0.862). We formalize this as an evaluation leverage account centered on the rank-flip condition. Constructively, the audited evaluation reading (AER) is a contract-marginalized, tie-declared, seed-prescribed, gate-filtered procedure whose tie declarations cover every contract-induced flip on the declared WMT19 grids (14/14; held-out 73% vs. union-of-ties 89%), matching the best single metric contract at epsilon=0.10 equivalence. Evidence spans DocRE, HacRED, a UD probe, and released gold revisions; an alternative-reference-set replication extends it beyond our testbeds. Failed predictions retained as boundaries; a 5%…