academics

Limits of pre-publication reviewing

Many problems in NLP papers can *not* be detected by reviewers who are checking submissions to conferences and journals. In medicine and many other field of science, people can raise concerns about papers *after* they are published, and authors are expected to take this seriously. This is not the practice in NLP, which is a shame.

academics

What Should Academic NLP Researchers Focus on?

Since commercial researchers dominate the “hot” area of large language models, I’ve seen a number of people ask “what should academic researchers focus on”. There are of course huge numbers of exciting and valuable scientific research questions which are not of much commercial interest, including long-term work which wont pay off commercially for 10+ years, high quality evaluation, socially useful but low-profit applications, and using NLP to research fundamental cognitive science questions.

academics

I dont like leaderboards

I dont like academic leaderboards. Poor scientific techniques, poor data, and poor evaluation means leaderboard results may not be worth much. I also suspect that the community’s fixation on leaderboards also means less research on important topics that do not fit the leaderboard model, such as understanding user requirements.