  We present the results of the NLP Community Metasurvey. Run from May to June
2022, the survey elicited opinions on controversial issues, including industry
influence in the field, concerns about AGI, and ethics. Our results put
concrete numbers to several controversies: For example, respondents are split
almost exactly in half on questions about the importance of artificial general
intelligence, whether language models understand language, and the necessity of
linguistic structure and inductive bias for solving NLP problems. In addition,
the survey posed meta-questions, asking respondents to predict the distribution
of survey responses. This allows us not only to gain insight on the spectrum of
beliefs held by NLP researchers, but also to uncover false sociological beliefs
where the community's predictions don't match reality. We find such mismatches
on a wide range of issues. Among other results, the community greatly
overestimates its own belief in the usefulness of benchmarks and the potential
for scaling to solve real-world problems, while underestimating its own belief
in the importance of linguistic structure, inductive bias, and
interdisciplinary science.
