[HN Gopher] Word2Vec received 'strong reject' four times at ICLR... ___________________________________________________________________ Word2Vec received 'strong reject' four times at ICLR2013 Author : georgehill Score : 282 points Date : 2023-12-18 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (openreview.net) (TXT) w3m dump (openreview.net) | cs702 wrote: | Surely those seemingly smart anonymous reviewers now feel pretty | dumb in hindsight. | | Peer review does _not_ work for new ideas, because _no one ever_ | has the time or bandwidth to spend hours upon hours upon hours | trying to understand new things. | mempko wrote: | This is not the takeaway I got. The takeaway I got was the | review process improved the paper and made it more rigorous. | How is that a bad thing? But yes, sometimes reviewers are | focusing on different issues instead of 'is this going to | revolutionize A, B, and C'. | huijzer wrote: | I currently have a paper under review (first round) that was | submitted the 2nd of August. This is at the second journal. | The first submission was a few months before that. | | I'm not sure peer review makes things more rigorous, but it | surely makes it more slow. | IKantRead wrote: | It's worth pointing out that most of the best science happened | before peer review was dominant. | | There's an article I came across awhile back, that I can't | easily find now, that basically mapped out the history of our | current peer review system. Peer review as we know it today was | largely born in the 70s and a response to several funding | crises in academia. Peer review was a strategy to make research | appear more credible. | | The most damning critique of peer-review of course is that it | completely failed to stop (and arguably aided) the | reproducibility crisis. We have an academic system where the | prime motivation is the secure funding through the image of | credibility, which from first principles is a recipe for wide | spread fraud. | hnfong wrote: | Peer review is basically Github anonymous PRs that has the | author pinky swear that the code compiles and 95% of test | cases pass. | | Academic careers are then decided by the Github activity | charts. | MichaelZuo wrote: | The whole 'pinky swear' aspect is far from ideal. | | But is there an alternative that still allows most academic | aspirants to participate? | abrichr wrote: | > Github | MichaelZuo wrote: | Do you understand what the parent is saying? It's clearly | an analogy, not a literal recommendation for all | academics to use Github. | abrichr wrote: | I understand, thank you for clarifying :) | | My point was that academics could use Github (or | something like it) | MichaelZuo wrote: | Can you write out the argument for it, or why you believe | it to be a net positive change compared to the current | paradigm? | HarHarVeryFunny wrote: | It seems kind of obvious that peer review is going to reward | peer think, peer citation, and academic incremental advance. | Obviously that's not how innovation works. | fatherzine wrote: | the system, as flawed as it is, is very effective for its | purpose. see eg "success is 10% inspiration and 90% | perspiration". on a darker side, the purpose is not to be | fair to any particular individual, or even to be conducive | to human flourishing at large. | HarHarVeryFunny wrote: | yes - maybe a good filter for future _academic_ success, | which seems to be a game unto itself | fl7305 wrote: | Have they done a double-blind test on the peer review system? | ribosometronome wrote: | >It's worth pointing out that most of the best science | happened before peer review was dominant. | | It's worth pointing out that most of everything happened | before peer review was dominant. Given how many advances | we've made in the past 50 years, so I'm not super sure | everyone would agree with your statement. If they did, they'd | probably also agree that most of the worst science also | happened before peer review was dominant, too, though. | jovial_cavalier wrote: | Our advances in the last 50 years have largely been in | engineering, not science. You could probably take a random | physics professor from 1970 and they'd not sweat too much | trying to teach physics at the graduate level today. | telotortium wrote: | But a biology professor from that time period would have | a lot of catching up to do, perhaps too much, especially | (but not only) if any part of their work touched | molecular biology or genetics. | ska wrote: | > It's worth pointing out that most of the best science | happened before peer review was dominant. | | This seems unlikely to be true, simply given the growth. If | you are arguing that the SNR ratio was better, that's | different. | ikesau wrote: | You might be thinking of Adam Mastroianni's essays on the | subject: | | https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall- | of-... https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of- | the-nake... | cs702 wrote: | You're probably thinking of this article: | | https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall- | of-... | smcin wrote: | But there is zero reason why the definition of peer review | hasn't immediately been extended to include: | | - accessing and verifying the datasets (in some tamper-proof | mechanism that has an audit trail). Ditto the code. This | would have detected the Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely alleged | frauds, and many others. It's much easier in domains like | behavioral psychology where the dataset size is spreadsheets | << 1Mb instead of Gb or Tb. | | - picking a selective sample of papers to check | reproducibility on; you can't verify all submissions, but you | sure could verify most accepted papers, also the top-1000 | most cited new papers each year in each field, etc. This | would prevent the worst excesses. | | PS a superb overview video [0] by Pete Judo "6 Ways | Scientists Fake Their Data" (p-hacking, data peeking, | variable manipulation, hypothesis-shopping and selectively | choosing the sample, selective reporting, also questionable | outlier treatment). Based on article [1]. Also as Judo | frequently remarks, there should be much more formal | incentive for publishing replication studies and negative | results. | | [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uqDhQxhmDg | | [1]: "Statisics by Jim: What is P Hacking: Methods & Best | Practices" https://statisticsbyjim.com/hypothesis- | testing/p-hacking/ | sdenton4 wrote: | I have been deeply unimpressed with the ML conference track | this last year... There's too many papers, too few reviewers, | leading to an insane number of PhD student-reviewers. We've | gotten some real nonsense reviews, with some real sins against | the spirit of science baked into them. | | For example, a reviewer essentially insisting that nothing is | worth publishing if it doesn't include a new architecture idea | and SOTA results... God forbid we better understand and | simplify the tools that already exist! | mrguyorama wrote: | Peer review isn't about the validity of your findings and the | reviewers are not tasked with evaluating the findings of the | researchers. The point is to be a light filter to make sure a | published paper has the necessary information and rigor for | someone else to try to replicate your experiment or build off | of your findings. Those are the processes for evaluating the | correctness of the findings. | narrator wrote: | Do they do anything different in other countries, or is it just | a copy of the U.S system? | andreyk wrote: | I have finished a PhD in AI just this past year, and can assure | you there exist reviewers who spend hours per review to do it | well. It's true that these days it's often the case that you | can (and are more likely than not to) get unlucky with lazier | reviewers, but that does not appear to have been the case with | this paper. | | For example just see this from the review of f5bf: | | "The main contribution of the paper comprises two new NLM | architectures that facilitate training on massive data sets. | The first model, CBOW, is essentially a standard feed-forward | NLM without the intermediate projection layer (but with weight | sharing + averaging before applying the non-linearity in the | hidden layer). The second model, skip-gram, comprises a | collection of simple feed-forward nets that predict the | presence of a preceding or succeeding word from the current | word. The models are trained on a massive Google News corpus, | and tested on a semantic and syntactic question-answering task. | The results of these experiments look promising. | | ... | | (2) The description of the models that are developed is very | minimal, making it hard to determine how different they are | from, e.g., the models presented in [15]. It would be very | helpful if the authors included some graphical representations | and/or more mathematical details of their models. Given that | the authors still almost have one page left, and that they use | a lot of space for the (frankly, somewhat superfluous) | equations for the number of parameters of each model, this | should not be a problem." | | These reviews in turn led to significant (though apparently not | significant enough) modifications to the paper (https://openrev | iew.net/forum?id=idpCdOWtqXd60¬eId=C8Vn84f...). These were | some quality reviews and the paper benefited from going this | review process, IMHO. | canjobear wrote: | The issue here wasn't that the reviewers couldn't handle a new | idea. They were all very familiar with word embeddings and ways | to make them. There weren't a lot a of new concepts in | word2vec, what distinguished it was that it was simple, fast, | and good quality. The software and pretrained vectors were easy | to access and use compared to existing methods. | magnio wrote: | There are more details in the FB post of Tomas Mikolov (author of | word2vec) recently: | https://www.facebook.com/share/p/kXYaYaRvRCr5K2Ze | | A hilarious and poignant point I see is how experts make mistake | too. Quote: | | > I also received a lot of comments on the word analogies - from | "I knew that too but forgot to publish it!" (Geoff Hinton, I | believe you :) happens to everyone, and anyways I think everybody | knows what the origin of Distributed Representations is) to "it's | a total hack and I'm sure it doesn't work!" (random guys who | didn't bother to read the papers and try it out themselves - | including Ian Goodfellow raging about it on Twitter). | nybsjytm wrote: | I tried asking on another thread what Goodfellow rage he's | referring to since all I could find was this: | https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/113352818965167718... | | If so, frankly I think it makes Mikolov sound pretty insecure. | lern_too_spel wrote: | Twitter no longer shows threads to people who aren't logged | in. | https://nitter.net/goodfellow_ian/status/1133528189651677184 | imjonse wrote: | That post sounds like a rant TBH with too many stabs at various | people. It could have been a lot more graceful. OTOH I can | believe most researchers are human and do not put the progress | of shared knowledge first but are very much influenced by ego | and money *cough* OpenAI *cough* | ReactiveJelly wrote: | To err is human, to seek profit is common to all lifeforms | albertzeyer wrote: | Also, Tomas says he came up with the encoder-decoder (seq-to- | seq) idea, and then Ilya and Quoc took over the idea after | Tomas moved on to Facebook. | | However, there is another statement by Quoc, saying this is not | true: https://twitter.com/quocleix/status/1736523075943125029 | | > We congratulate Tomas on winning the award. Regarding | seq2seq, there are inaccuracies in his account. In particular, | we all recall very specifically that he did not suggest the | idea to us, and was in fact highly skeptical when we shared the | end-to-end translation idea with him. Indeed, we worked very | hard to make it work despite his skepticism. | | So, word against word. I'm not accusing anyone of lying here, | one of them probably just misremembers, but this leaves also a | somewhat bad taste. | minwcnt5 wrote: | I think this must happen all the time. As they say, ideas are | cheap. It's likely that ALL of them had the seq-to-seq idea | cross their mind at some point before it was acted on, so if | credit is assigned to whoever said it out loud first, there's | going to be disagreement, since most people don't remember | the full details of every conversation. It's also possible | for someone to be skeptical of their own idea, so that | argument isn't compelling to me either. Ultimately credit | usually goes to the people who do the hard work to prove out | the idea, so it seems like the system worked as intended in | this case. | oldesthacker wrote: | This is what Tomas Mikolov said on Facebook: | | > I wanted to popularize neural language models by improving | Google Translate. I did start collaboration with Franz Och | and his team, during which time I proposed a couple of models | that could either complement the phrase-based machine | translation, or even replace it. I came up (actually even | before joining Google) with a really simple idea to do end- | to-end translation by training a neural language model on | pairs of sentences (say French - English), and then use the | generation mode to produce translation after seeing the first | sentence. It worked great on short sentences, but not so much | on the longer ones. I discussed this project many times with | others in Google Brain - mainly Quoc and Ilya - who took over | this project after I moved to Facebook AI. I was quite | negatively surprised when they ended up publishing my idea | under now famous name "sequence to sequence" where not only I | was not mentioned as a co-author, but in fact my former | friends forgot to mention me also in the long Acknowledgement | section, where they thanked personally pretty much every | single person in Google Brain except me. This was the time | when money started flowing massively into AI and every idea | was worth gold. It was sad to see the deep learning community | quickly turn into some sort of Game of Thrones. Money and | power certainly corrupts people... | | Reddit post: "Tomas Mikolov is the true father of sequence- | to-sequence" https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comment | s/18jzxpf/d_... | jll29 wrote: | Typical, saying they had the idea first without putting it on | the blockchain to prove the time stamp! | GartzenDeHaes wrote: | "Success has a thousand mothers, but failure is an orphan" | jncfhnb wrote: | To be fair I have some memories of the papers and surrounding | tech being really bad. The popular implementations didn't | actually do what the papers said and the tech wasn't great for | anything beyond word level comparisons. You got some juice | doing tf idf weighting of specific words but then tf idf | weighted bag of words was similarly powerful. | | Cosine similarity of the sum of different word vectors sounds | soooo dumb nowadays imo | iab wrote: | I wrote a detailed proof years before Mikolov on Twitter, but | the 280 characters were too small to contain it | lupusreal wrote: | Boiled down to the core essence, science is about testing ideas | to see if they work. Peer review is not part of this process, | they rarely if ever attempt replication during the peer review | process; and so they inevitably end up rejecting new ideas | without even trying them. This isn't science. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Thankfully you can just keep submitting the same paper to | different journals until someone is too busy to read it and | just approves it blindly. The academic publication shitshow | giveth and the academic publication shitshow taketh away. | H8crilA wrote: | The futile quest for algorithmification of truth, and the | loopholes that make the system work again despite having an | impossible objective in the first place. Couldn't have been | any different - in fact we can take this as evidence that AI | has not taken over science yet. | nybsjytm wrote: | I think the reviewers did a good job; the reviews are pretty | reasonable. Reviews are supposed to be about the quality of a | paper, not how influential they might be in the future! And not | all influential papers are actually very good. | lainga wrote: | "The eight-legged essay was needed for those candidates in | these civil service tests to show their merits for government | service... structurally and stylistically, the eight-legged | essay was restrictive and rigid. There are rules governing | different sections of the essay, including restrictions on the | number of sentences in total, the number of words in total, the | format and structure of the essay, and rhyming techniques." | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay#Viewpoints | nybsjytm wrote: | I guess your comment is against the restrictive and rigid | idea that peer review should be about making research papers | more intellectually rigorous? | hnfong wrote: | That's the medieval equivalent of leetcode. | | The problems that the imperial Chinese government had to | solve was pretty much the same as the problem the Big Tech | companies are trying to solve with leetcode. | | In earlier times, it used to be that the exams were more | freestyle, but when tens/hundreds of thousands of people | compete for a handful of high civil service positions, people | are motivated to cheat by memorizing essays pre-written by | somebody else. And the open-ended questions had subjective | answers that didn't scale. So they basically gamified the | whole thing. | fl7305 wrote: | They might not be perfect employees, but at least you know | they are smart, are disciplined, and have the capacity to | work hard for a long period. | lainga wrote: | And won't discuss salaries with each other :) | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_official_headwear | wahnfrieden wrote: | Sounds like a hazing ritual's outcome | sgift wrote: | Exactly what it is. "We had to go through it, so they'll | have to too!" plus "Someone who has so little self- | respect that they do _this_ will do _anything_ we ask of | them. " | | (I know that some people genuinely like Leetcode and | that's totally fine. But that's not why company want | people to do it) | lazide wrote: | If you think that's bad, wait until you hear about | medschool / nursing. | smcin wrote: | Standardized interviews or panels do not necessarily | exist to find the best candidate. They exist as a | tradeoff to ensure some measure of objectivity and | prevent favoritism/influence/corruption/bribery/forgery/i | mpersonation/unfair cheating by getting advance access to | the test material; in such a way that this can then be | verified, standardized, audited at higher levels or | nationally. Even more important for medschool/nursing | than engineering. | | One of countless examples was the sale of 7600 fake | nursing transcripts and diplomas in 2020/1 by three south | Florida nursing schools [0]. (This happened in the middle | of Covid, and at schools which were already being | deaccredited.) | | Buyers paid $10-15K to obtain fake diplomas and | transcripts indicating that they had earned legitimate | degrees, like a (two-year) associate degree in nursing; | these credentials then allowed the buyers to qualify for | the national nursing board exam (NCLEX). About 37% of | those who bought the fake documents -- or about 2,800 | people -- passed the exam. (Compare to candidates holding | a bachelor's degree in nursing (BSN) reportedly typically | pass at 90% compared to 84% for those with an associate | degree in nursing (ADN)). | | Among that 2700, a "significant number" then received | nursing licenses and secured jobs in unnamed hospitals | and other health care settings in MD, NY, NJ, GA. | | [0]: "7,600 Fake Nursing Diplomas Were Sold in Scheme, | U.S. Says" https://web.archive.org/web/20230928151334/htt | ps://www.nytim... | lazide wrote: | I meant more that a massive part of the experience is | hazing used to filter for less obvious criteria, but that | is also good info! | smcin wrote: | Right, sure. But I was saying it isn't by any means only | the candidates that we want to guard against misconduct | or lack of objectivity, or their schools, but the | interviewers/panelists/graders/regulators themselves. | | Hazing is just an unfortunately necessary side-effect of | this. | fl7305 wrote: | Are you saying "smart, are disciplined, and have the | capacity to work hard for a long period" have no bearing | on doing a good job? | wahnfrieden wrote: | No | neilv wrote: | For Leetcode, this is one of the typical | rationalizations. | | It's something a rich kid would come up with if they'd | never done real work, and were incapable of recognizing | it, but they'd seen body-building, and they decided | that's what everyone should demonstrate as the | fundamentals, and you can't get muscles like that without | being good at work. | | And of course, besides the flawed theory, everyone | cheated at the metric. | | But other rich kids had more time and money for the non- | work metrics-hitting, so the rich kid was happy they were | getting "culture fit". | fl7305 wrote: | The ancient Chinese exams were the exact opposite of what | you describe. | | The Chinese rulers realized they had a problem where | incompetent rich kids got promoted to important | government jobs. This caused the government and therefore | society to function poorly. As a result of this, many | people died unnecessarily. | | To combat this, the Chinese government instituted very | hard entrance exams that promoted competent applicants | regardless of rich parents. | alternative_a wrote: | The book _Ancient China in Transition - An analysis of | Social Mobility, 722-222 BC_ (Cho-yun Hsu, Stanford | University Press, 1965) discusses this transition in | rather great detail. | | https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian- | stu... | refulgentis wrote: | You're 100% right. Gave me a big, big smile after 7 years | at Google feeling like an alien, I was as a college | dropout from nowhere with nothing and nobody, but a | successful barely-6-figure exit at 27 years old. | | Big reason why the FAANGs get dysfunctional too. You | either have to be very, very, very, fast to fire, almost | arbitrarily (Amazon) or you end up with a bunch of people | who feel safe enough to be trying to advance. | | The "rich kids" w/o anything but college and FAANG were | taught Being Visible and Discussing Things and Writing | Papers is what "hard work" is, so you end up with a bunch | of people building ivory towers to their own intellect | (i.e. endless bikeshedding and arguing and design docs | and asking for design docs) and afraid of anyone around | them who looks like they are. | choppaface wrote: | Have been on a few panels where candidate passes all | leetcodes and then turned out to be very poor on the job | with in one case worst "teamwork" I've witnessed. These | were not FANG jobs though so might be more viable at a | larger company where it's ok to axe big projects, have | duplicated work, etc. leetcode is just one muscle and | many jobs require more than one muscle. | fl7305 wrote: | > then turned out to be very poor on the job with in one | case worst "teamwork" I've witnessed | | Which was what I meant by "might not be perfect | employees". | | > many jobs require more than one muscle | | Sure. But high intelligence, discipline and a capacity | for a high level of sustained effort is a good start. | godelski wrote: | And it's important to recognize the advantages and | disadvantages to ensure that we have proper context. | | For example, leetcode may be very appropriate for those | programming jobs which are fairly standard. At every job | you don't need to invent new things. Industrialization was | amazing because of this standardization and ability to mass | produce (in a way, potentially LLMs can be this for code. | Not quite there yet but it seems like a reasonable | potential). | | But on the other hand, there are plenty of jobs where there | are high levels of uniqueness and creativity and innovation | dominate the skills of repetition and regurgitation. This | is even true in research and science, though I think | creativity is exceptionally important. | | The truth is that you need both. Often we actually need | more of the former than the latter, but both are needed. | They have different jobs. The question is more about the | distribution of these skillsets that you need to accomplish | your goals. Too much rigidity is stifling and too much | flexibility is chaos. But I'd argue that in the centuries | we've better learned to wade through chaos and this is one | of the unique qualities that makes us human. To embrace the | unknown while everything in us fights to find answers, even | if they are not truth; because it is better to be ruled by | a malicious but rational god than the existential chaos. | sevagh wrote: | >But on the other hand, there are plenty of jobs where | there are high levels of uniqueness and creativity and | innovation dominate the skills of repetition and | regurgitation. This is even true in research and science, | though I think creativity is exceptionally important. | | Those companies still use leetcode for those positions. | It's just a blanket thing at this point. | godelski wrote: | Yes, and I think it is dumb. I'm personally fed up with | how much we as a society rely on metrics for the sake of | metrics. I can accept that things are difficult to | measure and that there's a lot of chaos. Imperfection is | perfectly okay. But I have a hard time accepting willful | ignorance, acting like it is objective. I'm sure I am | willfully ignorant many times too, but I think my ego | should take the hit rather than continue. | gms7777 wrote: | I agree. My own most influential paper received strong rejects | the first time we submitted it, and rightfully so, I think. In | retrospect, we didn't do a good job motivating it, the | contributions weren't clearly presented, and the way we | described was super confusing. I'm genuinely grateful for it | because the paper that we eventually published is so much | better (although the core of the idea barely changed), and it's | good because of the harsh reviews we received the first time | around. The reviews themselves weren't even particularly | "insightful", mostly along the lines of "this is confusing, I | don't understand what you're doing or why you're doing it", but | sometimes you just really need that outside perspective. | | I've also reviewed and rejected my share of papers where I | could tell there is a seed of a great idea, but the paper as | written just isn't good. It always brings me joy to see those | papers eventually published because they're usually so much | better. | KittenInABox wrote: | > The reviews themselves weren't even particularly | "insightful", mostly along the lines of "this is confusing, I | don't understand what you're doing or why you're doing it", | but sometimes you just really need that outside perspective. | | IMO maybe scientists should have experience critiquing stuff | like poems, short essays, or fiction. Expecting a critiquer | to give actually good suggestions matching your original | vision, when your original vision's presentation is flawed, | is incredibly rare. So the best critiques are usually a "this | section right here, wtf is it?" style, with added bonus | points to "wtf is this order of information" or other | literary technique that is either being misused or unused. | gms7777 wrote: | Oh, I do completely agree and didn't mean to imply | otherwise. I have had experiences where reviewers have | given me great ideas for new experiments or ways to present | things. But the most useful ones usually are the "wtf?" | type comments, or comments that suggest the reviewers | completely misunderstood or misread the text. While those | are initially infuriating, the reviewers are usually among | the people in the field that are most familiar with the | topic of the paper--if they don't understand it or misread | it, 95% of the time it's because it could be written more | clearly. | 0xDEAFBEAD wrote: | This is the first time I ever saw a scientist say something | positive about peer review | ska wrote: | Eh, happens all the time. It's an extremely rare paper that | isn't improved by th e process (though it's also a pain | sometimes, and clueless/antagonistic reviewers do happen) | jll29 wrote: | I haven't seen a manuscript that could not made a better | paper through peer review. | | Now there are good and bad reviewers, and good and bad | reviews. However, because you usually get assigned three | reviewers, the chance that there is not at least one good | reviewer or at least a good review from a middle to bad | reviewer is not that low, which means if you get over the | initial "reject" decision disappointment, you can benefit | from that written feedback. The main drawback is the loss | of time if a rejection means you may lose a whole year | (only for conferences, and only if you are not willing to | compromise by going to a "lower" conference after rejection | by a top one). | | I have often tried to fight for a good paper, but if the | paper is technically not high quality, even the most | original idea usually gets shot down, because top | conferences cannot afford to publish immature material for | reputational reasons. That's what happened to the original | Brin & Page Google/PageRank paper, which was submitted to | SIGIR and rejected. They dumped it to the "Journal of ISDN | Systems" (may this journal rest in peace, and with it all | ISDN hardware), and the rest is history. As the parent | says, you want to see people succeed, and you want to give | good grades (except in my experience many first year | doctoral students are often a bit too harsh with their | criticism). | johnfn wrote: | Don't you think something is missing if we've defined "quality" | as an independent and uncorrelated characteristic from | importance or influentiality? | SubiculumCode wrote: | When an author refuses to address reasonable questions by the | reviewers, what should you expect? There were legitimate | questions and concerns about potential alternative | explanations for the increase in accuracy raised by the | reviewers, and the authors didn't play ball. | nicklecompte wrote: | No, because "quality" means two different things here. I | believe the main reason word2vec became important was purely | on the software/engineering side, not because it was | scientifically novel. Advancements in Python development, | especially good higher-level constructs around numerical | linear algebra, meant that the fairly shallow and simple | tools of word2vec were available to almost every tech | company. So I don't think word2vec was (or is) particularly | good _research_ , but it became good _software_ for reasons | beyond its own control | | In 2016 or so it was proven that word2vec is equivalent to | the pointwise mutual information between the words in its | training set, after doing some preprocessing. This means that | Claude Shannon had things mostly figured out in the 60s, and | some reviewers were quite critical of the word2vec paper for | not citing similar developments in the 70s. | nybsjytm wrote: | Quality in the sense I meant it (cogency and intellectual | depth/rigor) should certainly be correlated with importance | and influence! | godelski wrote: | Yes and no. I think the larger issue is about the ambiguity | of what publications mean and should be. There's a lot of | ways to optimize this, and none of those has optimal | solutions. I don't think you should be down voted for your | different framing because I think we just need to be more | open about this chaos and consider other values than our own | or the road we're on. I think it is very unclear what we are | trying to optimize and it is quite apparent that you're going | to have many opinions on this and your group of reviewers may | all seek to optimize different things. The only solution I | can see is to stop pretending as if we know what each other | is trying to do and be a bit more explicit about it. Because | if we argue based on different assumptions we'll talk past | one another if we assume the other is working on the same set | of assumptions. | dr_kiszonka wrote: | I believe many journals focusing on potentially influential | papers is why we have a reproducibility crisis. Since it is | very hard to publish null results, people often don't even | bother trying. This leads to tons of wasted effort as | multiple groups attempt the same thing not knowing that | others before them have failed. | | Also, predicting whether a paper will be influential is very | hard and inherently subjective, unless you are reviewing | something truly groundbreaking. Quality-based reviews are | also subjective, but less so. | SubiculumCode wrote: | This is the right take, despite how some might will want to | frame it as 'reviewers are dummies'. | godelski wrote: | > I think the reviewers did a good job | | I actually disagree, but maybe not for the reasons you're | expecting. I actually disagree because the reviews are | unreasonably reasonable. They are void of context. | | It's tough to explain, but I think it's also something every | person who has written research papers can understand. How | there's a big bias between reading and writing and how our | works are not written to communicate our works as best as | possible, but in effect how to communicate to reviewers that | they should accept our works. The subtle distinction is | deceptively large and I think we all could be a bit more honest | about the system. After all, we want to optimize it, right? | | The problem I see is all a matter of context. Good ideas often | appear trivial once we see them. Often we fool ourselves into | thinking that we already knew this, but do not have meaningful | evidence that this is true but may try to reason that x = y + z | + epsilon, but almost any idea can be framed that way, even | breakthroughs like Evolution, Quantum Mechanics, or Relativity. | It is because we look back at giants from a distance but when | looking at works now don't see giants, but a bunch of children | standing on one another's shoulders standing in a trench coat. | That is the reality of it all. That few works are giant leaps | and bounds, but rather incremental. The ones that take the | biggest leaps are rare, often rely on luck (ambiguous | definition), and frequently (but not always, especially | considering the former) take a lot of time. Something we | certainly don't often have. | | We're trained as scientists and that means to be trained in | critiquing systems and letting questions spiral. Sometimes the | spiraling of questions shows how absurd an idea is but other | times it can show how ingenious it is. It's easier to recognize | the former but often hard to distinguish the latter. It is | always easy to ask for more datasets, more experiments, and | such, but these are critiques that can apply to any work as no | work is complete. This is especially true in cases of larger | breakthroughs, because any paradigm shift (even small) will | cause a cascade of questions and create a lot of curiosity. But | as we've all written papers, we know that this can often be a | never ending cycle and often is quite impractical. The | complaint about Table 4 is a perfect example. It is quite a | difficult situation. The complaint is perfectly reasonable in | that the question and concerns are quite valid and do warrant | further understanding. But at the same time they are | unreasonable because the requisite work required to answer | these is not appropriate for the timescale that we work on. Do | you have the compute or time to retrain all prior works to your | settings? To retrain all your works to their settings? Maybe it | doesn't work there which may or may not be evidence that the | other works are just as good or not. What it comes down to is | asking if these questions being answered could be another work | in their own right. I'm not in NLP as deep as I'm in CV, but I | suspect that the answer is yes (as in there are works that have | been published answering exactly those questions). | | There are also reasonably unreasonable questions in other | respects. Such as the question about cosine distance vs | Euclidean. This is one that I see quite often as we rely too | deeply on our understanding of lower dimensional geometries to | influence our understanding of high dimensional geometries. | Such things that seem obvious, like distance, are quite | ambiguous there and our example is the specific reason for the | curse of dimensionality (it becomes difficult to distinguish | the furthest point from the nearest point). But this often | leads us in quite the wrong direction. Honestly, it is a bit | surprising that the cosine similarity works (as D->inf | cos(x,y)-> 0 forall x,y in R^D because any random vector is | expected to be orthogonal meaning that to get cos(x,y)=1 means | y = x + epsilon with epsilon -> 0 as D->inf. But I digress), | but it does. There definitely could be entire works exploring | these geometries and determining different geodesics. It is | entirely enough for a work to simply have something working, | even if it doesn't quite yet make sense. | | The thing is that science is exceptionally fuzzy. Research is | people walking around in the dark and papers are them | communicating what we have found. I think it is important for | us to remember this framing because we should then characterize | the viability/publishability of a work not as illuminating | everything but if the things found are useful (which itself is | not always known). Because you might uncover a cavern and then | it becomes easy to say "report back when you've explored it", | but such an effort may be impossible to do alone. It can be a | dead end, one that can take decades to explore (we'll always | learn something though) or it may lead to riches we've never | seen before. We don't know, but that's really what we're all | looking for (hopefully more about riches for humanity than | one's self, but one should be rewarded for sure). | | This is why honestly, I advocate for abandoning the | journal/conference system and leverage our modern tools like | OpenReview to accelerate communication. Because it enables us | to be more open about our limitations, to discuss our failures, | and write to our peers rather than our critics. Critics are of | course important, but they can take over too easily because | they are reasonable and correct, but oft missing context. For | an example, see the many HN comments about a technology in its | infancy where people will complain that it is not yet | competitive with existing technologies and thus devalue the | potential. Oft missing the context that it takes time to | compete, the time and energy put in by so many before us to | make what we have now, but also that there are limits and | despite only being a demonstration the new thing does not have | the same theoretical limits. The question is rather about if | such research warrants more eyes and even a negative result can | be good because it can communicate that we've found dead ends | (which is something we actively discourage, needlessly forcing | many researchers to re-explore these dead spaces). There's so | much more that I can say and this is woefully incomplete but I | can't fit a novel into our comments and I'm afraid the length | as it is already results in poor communication to the given | context of the platform. Thanks anyone who has taken this time. | jll29 wrote: | Journal articles/conference papers are not the only outlet, | you can still write technical monographs if you feel review | cycles are holding you back. | godelski wrote: | It depends. Right now I'm a grad student and I'm just | trying to graduate. My friend, who already left, summed it | up pretty well. | | > I don't want to be a successful academic, I want to be a | successful scientist. Which I believe are no longer the | same thing. | | I'm just trying graduate and just have to figure out how to | play the game enough to leave. Honestly, I do not see | myself ever submitting to a journal or conference again. | I'll submit to OpenReview, ArXiv, and my blog. I already | open my works to discussions on GitHub and am very active | in responses and do actually appreciate critiques (there's | lots of room for improvement). In fact, my most cited work | has been rejected many times, but we also have a well known | blog post as a result, and even more than a year later we | get questions on our GitHub (which we still respond to, | even though many are naive and asks for help debugging | python, not our code). | | But I'm done with academia because I have no more faith in | it. I'd love to actually start or work for a truly open ML | research group, where it is possible to explore seemingly | naive or unpopular ideas, to not just accept things the way | they are and forced to chase hype. I will turn down lots of | money to do such a thing. To not just metric hack but be | honest about limitations of my works and what still needs | to be done, that saying such things is not simply giving | ammunition to those who would use it against me. To do | research that takes time rather than chase a moving | goalpost, against people with more compute who rely on pay | to play, nor work in this idiotic publish or perish | paradigm. To not be beholden to massive compute or to be | restricted to only be able to tune what monoliths have been | created. To challenge the LLM and Diffusion paradigms that | are so woefully incomplete despite there undeniable | success. To openly recognize that both these things can be | true without it being misinterpreted as undermining these | successes. You'd think academia would be the place for | this, but I haven't seen a shred of evidence that it is. | I've only seen the issues grow. | geysersam wrote: | But if that's the case why put so much focus on and effort into | the peer review system? | | If you ask people funding research I'm pretty sure they'd | prefer to fund influential ideas than non-influential "high- | quality" paper production. | nybsjytm wrote: | Even if you were to take the extreme position that influence | or citation counts are all that matter, the problem is that | 'future influence' is hard if not impossible to judge well in | the present. (Of course it's easy to point to cases where | it's possible to make an educated or confident guess.) | | Also, an emphasis on clarity and intellectual depth/rigor is | important for the healthy development of a field. Not for | nothing, the lack of this emphasis is a pretty common | criticism of the whole AI field! | Baader-Meinhof wrote: | High-quality writing improves information dissemination. A | paper like word2vec has probably been skimmed by 10's of | thousands, perhaps 100's of thousands people. | | One extra day of revising is nothing, comparatively. | fanzhang wrote: | Agree that this is how papers are often judged, but strong | disagree on how this is how papers should be judged. This is | exactly the problem of reviewers looking for the keys under the | lamp post (does the paper check these boxes), versus where they | lost the keys (should this paper get more exposure because it | advances the field). | | The fact that the first doesn't lead more to the second is a | failure of the system. | | This is the same sort of value system that leads to accepting | job candidates with neat haircuts and says the right | shibboleths, versus the ones that make the right bottom line | impact. | | Basically, are "good" papers that are very rigorous but lead to | nothing actually "good"? If your model of progress in science | is that rigorous papers are a higher probability roll of the | dice, and nonrigorous papers are low probability rolls of the | dice, then we should just look for rigorous papers. And that a | low-rigor paper word2vec actually make progress was "getting | really lucky" and we should have not rated the paper well. | | But I contend that word2vec was also very innovative, and that | should be a positive factor for reviewers. In fact, I bet that | innovative papers have a hard time being super rigorous because | the definition of rigor in that field has yet to be settled | yet. I'm basically contending that on the extreme margins, | rigor is negatively correlated with innovation. | nybsjytm wrote: | I don't consider clearly stating your model and meaningfully | comparing it to prior work and other models (seemingly the | main issues here) to be analogous to a proper haircut or a | shibboleth. Actually I think it's a strange comparison to | make. | aaronkaplan wrote: | Your argument is that if a paper makes a valuable | contribution then it should be accepted even if it's not well | written. But the definition of "well written" is that it | makes it easy for the reader to understand its value. If a | paper is not well written, then reviewers won't understand | its value and will reject it. | seanmcdirmid wrote: | Well written and rigor aren't highly correlated. You can | have poorly written papers that are very rigorous, and vic | versa. Rigor is often another checkbox (does the paper have | some quantitative comparisons), especially if the proper | rigor is hard to define by the writer or the reader. | | My advice to PhD students is to always just focus on | subjects where the rigor is straightforward, since that | makes writing papers that get in easier. But of course, | that is a selfish personal optimization that isn't really | what's good for society. | nybsjytm wrote: | Rigor here doesn't have to mean mathematical rigor, it | includes qualitative rigor. It's unrigorous to include | meaningless comparisons to prior work (which is a | credible issue the reviewers raised in this case) and | it's also poor writing. | seanmcdirmid wrote: | Qualitative rigor isn't rigor at all, it's the opposite. | Still useful in a good narrative, sometimes it's the best | thing you have to work as evidence in your paper. | | Prior work is a mess in any field. The PC will over | emphasize the value of their own work, of course, just | because of human ego. I've been on way too many papers | where my coauthors defensively cite work based on who | could review the paper. I'm not versed enough about this | area to know if prior work was really an issue or not, | but I used to do a lot of paper doctoring in fields that | I wasn't very familiar with. | jll29 wrote: | You are right. I often got told "You don't compare with | anything" when proposing something very new. That's true, | because if you are literally the first one attempting a task, | there isn't any benchmark. The trick then is to make up at | least a straw man alternative to your method and to compare | with that. | | Since then, I have evolved my thinking, and I now use | something that isn't just a straw man: Before I even conceive | my own method or model or algorithm, I ask myself "What is | the simplest non-trivial way to do this?". For example, when | tasked with developing a transformer based financial | summarization system we pretrained a BERT model from scratch | (several months worth of work), but I also implemented a | 2-line grep based mini summarizer as a shell script, which | defied the complexity of the BERT transformer yet proved to | be a competitor tought to beat: | https://www.springerprofessional.de/extractive- | summarization... | | I'm inclined to organize a workshop on small models with few | parameters, and to organize a shared task as part of it where | no model can be larger than 65 kB, a sort of "small is | beautiful" workshop in dedication of Occam. | hospadar wrote: | Papers are absolutely judged on impact - it's not as though | any paper submitted to Nature gets published as long as it | gets through peer review. Most journals (especially high- | impact for-profit journals) have editors that are selecting | interesting and important papers. I think it's probably a | good idea to separate those two jobs ("is this work rigorous | and clearly documented") vs ("should this be included in the | fall 2023 issue"). | | That's (probably) good for getting the most important papers | to the top, but it also strongly disincentivizes whole | categories (often very important paper). Two obvious | categories are replication studies and negative results. "I | tried it too and it worked for me" "I tried it too and it | didn't work" "I tried this cool thing and it had absolutely | no effect on how lasers work" could be the result of tons of | very hard work and could have really important implications, | but you're not likely to make a big splash in high-impact | journals with work like that. A well-written negative result | can prevent lots of other folks from wasting their own time | (and you already spent your time on it so might as well write | it up). | | The pressure for impactful work also probably contributes to | folks juicing the stats or faking results to make their | results more exciting (other things certainly contribute to | this too like funding and tenure structures). I don't think | "don't care about impact" is a solution to the problem | because obviously we want the papers that make cool new | stuff. | tbruckner wrote: | Will keep happening because peer review itself, ironically, has | no real feedback mechanism. | ttpphd wrote: | This is exactly correct! It's an asymmetrical accountability | mechanism. | iceIX wrote: | The whole reason OpenReview was created was to innovate and | improve on the peer review process. If you have ideas, reach | out to the program chairs of the conference you're submitting | to. Many of them are open to running experiments. | imjonse wrote: | It seems they have rejected initial versions of the paper, since | there had been later updates and clarifications based on the | reviews. So it seems this was beneficial in the end and how | review process should work? Especially since this was | groundbreaking work it makes sense there is more effort put into | explaining why it works instead of relying too much on good | benchmark results. | Der_Einzige wrote: | Makes me not feel bad about my own rejections when I see stuff | like this or Yann Lecun reacting poorly on twitter to his own | papers being rejected. | Hayvok wrote: | The review thread (start at the bottom & work your way up) reads | like a Show HN thread that went negative. | | The paper initially received some questions/negative feedback, so | the authors updated and tweaked the reviewers a bit -- | | > "We welcome discussion... The main contribution (that seems to | have been missed by some of the reviews) is that we can use very | shallow models to compute good vector representation of words." | | The response to the authors' update: | | > Review: The revision and rebuttal failed to address the issues | raised by the reviewers. I do not think the paper should be | accepted in its current form. > Quality rating: Strong reject > | Confidence: Reviewer is knowledgeable | wzdd wrote: | There are indeed four entries saying "strong reject", but they | all appear to be from the same reviewer, at the same time, and | saying the same thing. Isn't this just the one rejection? | | Also, why is only that reviewer's score visible? | pmags wrote: | I'm curious how many commenters here who are making strong | statements about the worth (or not) of peer review have actually | participated in it both as author AND reviewer? Or even as an | editor who is faced with the challenge of integrating and | synthesizing multiple reviews into a recommendation? | | There are many venues available to share your research or ideas | absent formal peer review, arXiv/bioRxiv being among the most | popular. If you reject the idea of peer review itself it seems | like there are plenty of alternatives. | ska wrote: | It's the internet, therefore a significant percentage of the | strong opinions about any topic will come from people who have | little to no experience or competence in the area. Being HN, it | probably skews a bit better that average. OTOH, it will also | skew towards people procrastinating. Factor that in how you | will... | mxwsn wrote: | Flagged for misleading title - the four strong rejects are from a | single author. It's listed four times for some unknown reason but | likely an openreview quirk. The actual status described by the | page is: 2 unknown (with accompanying long text), 1 weak reject, | and 1 strong reject. | zaptheimpaler wrote: | We already have a better mechanism for publishing and peer | review.. it's called the internet. Literally the comments section | of Reddit would work better. Reviews would be tied to a | pseudonymous account instead of anonymous, allowing people to | judge the quality of reviewers as well. Hacker News would work | just as well too. It's also nearly free to setup a forum and | frictionless to use compared to paying academic journals $100k | for them to sell your own labour back to you. Cost and ease of | use also mean more broadly accessible and hence more widely | reviewed. | vasco wrote: | Every once in a while I see a thread on reddit about a subject | I know about and if someone shares a factual account that | sounds unpopular it'll be downvoted even though it's true. I | think reddit would be a terrible way to do this. | raverbashing wrote: | But academic review is like that, with the worse | _acktchsually_ guys in existance | ribosometronome wrote: | The worst? Are you sure? Reddit's worst acktchsually guys | are often spilling out of actual cesspit hate subreddits. | raverbashing wrote: | There is some meta-knowledge in your comment, but I'm | focusing solely on the critique and pedantry levels, no | comment on other factors | 0xDEAFBEAD wrote: | https://www.lesswrong.com/ lets you vote separately on | agreement and quality axes. That seems to help a little bit. | 0xDEAFBEAD wrote: | The groupthink problems on reddit are quite severe. | raverbashing wrote: | And this is why the biggest evolution of AI has happened in | companies, not in academic circles | | Because there's too much nitpicking and grasping at straws | amongst people that can't see novelty even when it's dancing in | front of them | layer8 wrote: | No, the reason is that it required substantial financial | investments, and in some cases access to proprietary big-data | collections. | raverbashing wrote: | word2vec does not require a large amount of data | | mnist might have required a large amount of data at its | creation, but it became a staple dataset | | There was a lot of evolution before ChatGPT | L3viathan wrote: | And people in academia were all over Word2Vec. Mikolov | presented his work in our research group around 2014, and | people were very excited. Granted, that was _after_ | Word2Vec had been published, and this was a very pro- | vectorspaces (although of a different type) crowd. | tinyhouse wrote: | I agree that Glove was a fraud. | m3kw9 wrote: | That didn't age well | picometer wrote: | In hindsight, reviewer f5bf's comment is fascinating: | | > - It would be interesting if the authors could say something | about how these models deal with intransitive semantic | similarities, e.g., with the similarities between 'river', | 'bank', and 'bailout'. People like Tversky have advocated against | the use of semantic-space models like NLMs because they cannot | appropriately model intransitive similarities. | | What I've noticed in the latest models (GPT, image diffusion | models, etc) is an ability to play with words when there's a | double meaning. This struck me as something that used to be very | human, but is now in the toolbox of generative models. (Most of | which, I assume, use something akin word2vec for deriving | embedding vectors from prompts.) | | Is the word2vec ambiguity contributing to the wordplay ability? I | don't know, but it points to a "feature vs bug" situation where | such an ambiguity is a feature for creative purposes, but a bug | if you want to model semantic space as a strict vector space. | | My interpretation here is that the word/prompt embeddings in | current models are so huge that they're overloaded with redundant | dimensions, such that it wouldn't satisfy any mathematical | formalism (eg of well-behaved vector spaces) at all. | intalentive wrote: | Even small models (e.g. hidden dims = 32) should be able to | handle token ambiguity with attention. The information is not | so much in the token itself as in the context. | PaulHoule wrote: | I'd reject it still (speaking of someone who has developed | products based on word vectors, document vectors, dimensional | reduction, etc. before y'all thought it was cool...) | | I quit a job because they were insisting on using Word2Vec in an | application where it would have doomed the project to failure. | The basic problem is that in a real-life application many of the | most important words are _not in the dictionary_ and if you throw | out words that are not in the dictionary you _choose_ to fail. | | Let a junk paper like that through and the real danger is that | you will get 1000s of other junk papers following it up. | | For instance, take a look at the illustrations on this page | | https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/ | | particularly under "2. Linear Substructures". They make it look | like a miracle that they project down from a 50-dimensional | subspace down to 2 and get a nice pattern of cities and zip | codes, for instance. The thing is you could have a random set of | 20 points in a 50-d space and, assuming there are no degeneracy, | you can map them to any 20 points you want in the 2-d space with | an appropriately chosen projection matrix. Show me a graph like | that with 200 points and I might be impressed. (I'd say those | graphs on that server damage the Stanford brand for me about as | much as SBF and Marc Tessier-Lavign) | | (It's a constant theme in dimensional reduction literature that | people forget that random matrices often work pretty well, fail | to consider how much gain they are getting over the random | matrix, ...) | | BERT, FastText and the like were revolutionary for a few reasons, | but I saw the use of subword tokens as absolutely critical | because... for once, you could capture a medical note and not | _erase the patient 's name!_ | | The various conventions of computer science literature prevented | explorations that would have put Word2Vec in its place. For | instance, it's an obvious idea that you should be able to make a | classifier that, given a document vector, can predict "is this a | color word?" or "is this a verb?" but if you actually try it, it | doesn't work in a particularly maddening way. With a tiny | training/eval set (say 10 words) you might convince yourself it | is working, but the more data you train on the more you realize | the words are scattered mostly randomly and even those those | "linear structures" exist in a statistical sense they aren't well | defined and not particularly useful. It's the kind of thing that | is so weird and inconclusive and fuzzy that I'm not aware of | anyone writing a paper about it... Cause you're not going to draw | any conclusions out of it except that you found a Jupiter-sized | hairball. | | For all the excitement people had over Word2Vec you didn't see an | explosion of interest in vector search engines because... | Word2Vec sucked, applying it to documents didn't improve the | search engine very much. Some of it is that adding sensitivity to | synonyms can hurt performance because many possible synonyms turn | out to be red herrings. BERT, on the other hand, is context | sensitive and is able to some extent know the different because | "my pet jaguar" and "the jaguar dealership in your town" and that | really does help find the relevant documents and hide the | irrelevant documents. | funnystories wrote: | when i was on college, i wrote a simple system to make | corrections on text based on some heuristics for a class. | | then, the teacher of the class suggested me to write a paper | describing the system for a local conference during the summer, | with some results etc | | I wrote it with his support but it got rejected right away | because of poor grammar or something similar. the conference was | in Brazil, but required the papers to be in English. I was just a | student and thought that indeed my english was pretty bad. the | teacher said to me to at least send an email to the reviewers to | get some feedback, maybe resubmit with the corrections. | | i asked specifically which paragraphs were confusing. they sent | me some snippets of phrases that were obviously wrong. yes, they | were the "before" examples of "before/after" my system applied | the corrections. I tried to explain that the grammar should be | wrong, but the just replied with "please fix your english | mistakes and resubmit". | | i tried 2 or 3 more times but just gave up. | adastra22 wrote: | You remind me of these anecdotes by Feynman of his time in | Brazil. Specifically search for "I was invited to give a talk | at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences", but the whole thing is | worth a read if you haven't seen it: | | https://southerncrossreview.org/81/feynman-brazil.html | wizzwizz4 wrote: | _*eyeroll*_ Sounds about right. Want to get that published | anyway? You could pop it on the arXiv and let the HN hivemind | suggest an appropriate venue. | | If you don't have arXiv access, find an endorser | <https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html>, and send them a | SHORT polite email (prioritise brevity over politeness) with | your paper and the details. Something like: | | > Hello, | | > I wrote a paper for college in yyyy (attached) on automatic | grammar correction, which got rejected from _Venue_ for | grammatical errors in the figures. I still want to publish it. | Could you endorse my arXiv account, please? | | > Also, could you suggest an appropriate venue to submit this | work to? | | > Yours sincerely, | | > your name, etc | | Follow the guidance on the arXiv website when asking for | endorsement. | funnystories wrote: | thank you for the suggestion, but it was just an | undergraduate paper written in ~2014. I don't see any | relevance in publishing it now. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | It is a lot of effort to get something through the | publication process, but if you can't find the technique | you used in ten minutes of searching | https://scholar.archive.org/, it would be a benefit to the | commons if you published your work. At least on a website | or something. | rgmerk wrote: | I've been a reviewer and occasionally written reviews a bit | like you describe. | | Papers are an exercise in communicating information to the | paper's readers. If the writing makes it very difficult for the | audience to understand that information, the paper is of little | use and not suitable for publication regardless of the quality | of the ideas within. | | It is not the reviewer's job to rewrite the paper to make it | comprehensible. Not only do reviewers not have time, it is not | their job. | | Writing is not easy, and writing technical papers is a | genuinely difficult skill to learn. But it is necessary for the | work to be useful. | | To be honest, it sounds like the teacher who suggested you | write the paper let you down and wasted your time. Either the | work was worth their time to help you revise it in to | publishable form, or they shouldn't have suggested it in the | first place. | matsemann wrote: | Did you ironically misread their comment, and didn't realize | the grammar the reviewers were complaining about was the | known bad examples his algo could fix? | maleldil wrote: | It's hard to believe that the reviewers misunderstood the | examples. It's more likely that the surrounding text was | badly written, and the reviewers had no idea what they | should be looking at. | jll29 wrote: | There is the option of contacting the program committee | chair or proceedings editor to complain if the reviewers | misunderstood something fundamentally, like it looks like | it happened in his example. | | The teacher should have fought this battle for the pupil, | or they ought to have their efforts re-targeted another | conference. | rgmerk wrote: | Ha! | | Sorry, I did miss that. And yes, that sounds like lazy | reviewing . | | But I have also read many word salads from grad students | that their supervisors should never have let go to a | reviewer. | nsagent wrote: | Previous discussion: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38654038 | rahmaniacc wrote: | This was hilarious! | | Many very broad and general statements are made without any | citations to back them up. | | - Please be more specific. | | The number of self-citations seems somewhat excessive. | | - We added more citations. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-12-18 23:00 UTC)