Making a Good Oral Presentation

A few words of practical advice about making a good oral presentation: Show your passion. Passion is contagious. The purpose of your talk is to get people interested to read your paper. Show that you are excited about the work you did and about the research topic in general. Have a clear take-home message. What …

The thinking behind the ACL preprint policy

by Christopher Manning. In October 2017, after much discussion and surveying, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) adopted new policies on submission, review, and citation. A key change was to disallow conference submission of papers that have been posted or updated as non-anonymous preprints during a period from one month before the submission deadline until after …

How to give a good talk on a Computational Linguistics topic

“We are delighted to inform you..” Yes, you made it. Congratulations! And you’re off to planning your trip to the next conference, to enjoy the next breeze of fresh research ideas (or the conference surroundings...). But wait a minute. You have to prepare that talk. Publishing is more than just writing papers. It is an …

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Author: Omer Levy (University of Washington) PC Chair Note: Omer is an outstanding reviewer and author, one of my favorite rising stars. -Heng Writing reviews is a time-consuming task, and it can be tempting to get it over quickly or view it as one of the thankless chores of academia. However, it's also a rare …

Reviewing Advice by Gemma Boleda

Author: Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)   PC Chair Note: Gemma was an outstanding reviewer in 2016. We are very grateful for her nice advice! One thing I do, when needed, is to give feedback about the write-up of the article. This ranges from the very basic "please help the reader follow your work by …

Putting the Linguistics in Computational Linguistics

The wonderful NAACL 2018 PC co-chairs asked for a some thoughts on how to make a computational linguistics papers linguistically informative.  My take on this is that not all NAACL papers need to be linguistically informative—but they should all be linguistically informed.  Here are a four steps to achieving that, which I hope will be …

Some Holiday Reviewing Advice

Author: Nitin Madnani (Educational Testing Service) When Heng and Amanda asked me if I wanted to write an invited post on the NAACL 2018 Chairs' Blog on how to review well, my first thought was "do I really have any advice that people haven't already heard?" But then I realized that I do have some …

Write for Your Reader, Not for Yourself

Authors: David Chiang (University of Notre Dame) Kevin Knight (University of Southern California / Information Sciences Institute)   In our previous post, we ended with the advice to write for your readers, not yourself. This is, truly, easier said than done. Here are three concrete ways to put this into practice. The (n + 1)st …

Three Writing Tips You Already Know

Authors: David Chiang (University of Notre Dame) Kevin Knight (University of Southern California / Information Sciences Institute)   A few years ago, we prepared a series of workshops on writing research papers and talks. Our first workshop began with three obvious principles: Understand your ideas. Know what a good paper looks like. Write for your …

Musings on writing on an NLP/CL paper

Author: Dan Bikel (Google Research)   Writing an NLP/computational linguistics paper can be a daunting prospect, even for seasoned researchers. I approach it way I approach writing for any academic discipline: the continuing stream of papers in the field can be viewed as one giant colloquy amongst the researchers. The point of that joint conversation is …