NAACL HLT 2009 impressions
Topics: NLP, Thoughts | June 3, 2009 @ 4:59 PM
So NAACL is just finishing up (I’m at CoNLL tomorrow and the day after). This was the first time I’ve been to a big conference (well, any conference) and it was different from what I expected, but mainly only because of one thing: presenters suck. In order for a presentation to be good, a variety of things must be all be present. The presenter needs to be able to speak English without too thick of an accent; he/she should be able to enunciate; he/she should not be monotonous; he/she should know how to organize presentations and what information is appropriate to give in a presentation setting (vs. that of a paper); and really, most of all, he/she should NOT BE BORING. You take one of these things away, and the presentation’s quality instantly drops, and for people with an attention span like mine, that means that no matter how much I want to hear what the presenter has to say, I don’t.
My supervisor advised me beforehand that these things are more about networking than anything else and gave me some advice on how to do so. And after going through a number of these presentations, I can see that that is definitely preferable (even for someone as socially awkward and gauche as myself) to the waste of time that is many presentations – it almost seems as though I’d simply be better off reading the paper. The only thing that presentations get us is the opportunity to ask questions to the author(s) in person, and if these questions have good critiques they should really be done in an archived manner so that bad papers that somehow slipped through the review process get the criticism that they need. Unfortunately, NLP is very conference-driven and journals don’t play as much of a role as conferences do; in terms of content, journal papers generally simply have more detail (and hence are longer) than their conference counterparts.
Don’t get me wrong; some presentations were great, but they were by far the minority. It’s quite disappointing when you take the time to read through the abstracts to choose which sessions you’d like to attend only to find that you can’t pay attention to the presenter because he’s deathly boring.
On the flip side, I do have some very positive comments about the Student Research Workshop, which is where my paper was accepted for presentation. The workshop provided an opportunity for those students who are earlier on in their academic careers to submit works-in-progress in order to get comments from senior researchers in the NLP community as well as gain exposure. I wasn’t originally planning on revisiting the topic of my paper anytime soon, but some of the comments I was given have me quite intrigued and I may just come back to some of them at some point in the future. Having a publication can also give students a leg up on graduate school applications (if the publication is accepted in time, of course, which wasn’t the case for me). I’m deeply grateful to the organizers and hope I can help (in whatever way) in seeing more of these workshops happen in the future.
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