Too many cooks?

Computational Linguistics is becoming like the Science or Nature. For instance, see this paper in the current issue: (In this case, the broth wasn't spoiled ;-)

Guess which paper has the largest number of authors on the ACL anthology?

To theory or not to theory

I stumbled upon this paper "Reflections after Refereeing Papers for NIPS" by Leo Breiman that gives some really candid insights into theory papers. (Unfortunately, I could not find a soft copy to share, except this link.) Some noteworthy observations:

"No theorems" implies "No theory"

"... more than 99% of the published papers are useless exercises."

"Mathematical theory is not critical to development of machine learning."

"Our fields would be better off with far fewer theorems, less emphasis on faddish stuff, and much more into scientific inquiry and engineering."

I really liked this article, especially coming from someone who has been working in theory all his life but I would still prefer reading papers giving theoretical insight, however useless, than pages and pages of feature engineering & experimentation using classifier X on problem Y -- the current trend at ACL.

A quick scan at ACL

Mendicant Bug informs about a new tag-cloud service called Wordle. Here is a look at this year's ACL. Gives a clear idea of what is going on! A larger image is available here.