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.

Powerset Natural Language Search

Powerset, a company we only remember seeing as conference sponsors, now actually has something working. After receiving an email from them, I tried out several queries. At best, it seems to answer most Wh-questions and certain whole-part relations.

Try out the same query on Google.

Writing style

The sweetest thing ever written in a paper: "The reader who is unfamiliar with this field or who has allowed his or her facility with some of its concepts to fall into disrepair may profit from a brief perusal of Feller (1950) and Gallagher (1968)."

- Brown et. al., "Class based n-gram Models of Natural Language.", Computational Linguistics, 1990

Searching ACL anthology

If you are looking up the ACL anthology regularly, my friend Markus has a nice firefox search plugin to do that. You can get that and others from this page.

ACL accepted papers

Hal posted a while back about the ACL accepted papers that I just read now -- I've been living under a rock for some time. You can get a printer friendly version here. I know, my paper did not make it to that list :(

New additions to my reading list:

Distributional Identification of Non-Referential Pronouns
Shane Bergsma, Dekang Lin and Randy Goebel

An Unsupervised Approach to Biography Production using Wikipedia
Fadi Biadsy, Julia Hirschberg and Elena Filatova

Resolving Personal Names in Email Using Context Expansion
Tamer Elsayed, Douglas Oard and Galileo Namata

Mining Wiki Resources for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition
Alexander Richman and Patrick Schone

Inducing Gazetteers for Named Entity Recognition by Large-scale Clustering of Dependency Relations
Jun'ichi Kazama and Kentaro Torisawa

Name Translation in Statistical Machine Translation - Learning When to Transliterate
Ulf Hermjakob, Kevin Knight and Hal Daume



The Tradeoffs Between Open and Traditional Relation Extraction
Michele Banko and Oren Etzioni

(Longest paper title)
Unsupervised Discovery of Generic Relationships Using Pattern Clusters and its Evaluation by Automatically Generated SAT Analogy Questions
Dmitry Davidov and Ari Rappoport

Finding Contradictions in Text
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Anna Rafferty and Christopher Manning

Extracting Question-Context-Answer Triples from Online Forums
Shilin Ding, Gao Cong, Chin-Yew Lin and Xiaoyan Zhu

EM Can Find Pretty Good HMM POS-Taggers (When Given a Good Start)
Yoav Goldberg, Meni Adler and Michael Elhadad

Extraction of Entailed Semantic Relations Through Syntax-based Comma Resolution
Vivek Srikumar, Roi Reichart, Mark Sammons, Ari Rappoport and Dan Roth

Learning Bigrams from Unigrams
Xiaojin Zhu, Andrew Goldberg, Michael Rabbat and Robert Nowak

Evaluating Roget's Thesauri
Alistair Kennedy and Stan Szpakowicz

Randomized Language Models via Perfect Hash Functions
David Talbot and Thorsten Brants

Solving Relational Similarity Problems Using the Web as a Corpus
Preslav Nakov and Marti Hearst