'The Night' - 3 Friends and 2 strangers!

The Nights

Chapter 1: 3 Friends and 2 Strangers!

It is end of the semester and Hyderabad's scorching heat is taking its toll, even killing a person or two every other day in the city. It has been so hot that some 'fake' researchers at the institute have shown that omelets are the best products that could be baked in this sun. There have been some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) along with the opposition party members that have been staging dharna against the irresponsible state government that doesn't take measures to stop the sun. Some went on to relate this act of irresponsibility to the caste based discrimination that the leading party's candidates are well known for.

None of which seems to have an impact on this passing-out batch of undergraduates at IIIT Hyderabad. Especially those young couples that have happily got together after four frustrating years of being single. None of them seem to be in a hurry to be committed, they are still kids after all; while some even say "we are just friends!" and hide behind the bushes. Among this batch three students, 2 girls and a boy, were chatting at the coffee corner in the campus.

Meanwhile two other frustrated research students, K & C (both MS by Research brand of 2k6 batch), both from different departments were variously frustrated. They had their own horrifying "research" stories to tell but none of the two willing to cut loose. They both had come back tired from a satisfying dinner eating 4 parathas each and had decided to go on to fetch at least 2 cups of mango juice each. They took a long calm walk through the campus towards the coffee corner, both casually reminiscing good old days when they had a batch of PG2k6. The first thing that strikes both of them is the unlimited fun each one in the gang had in room number 40 of the boys hostel.

Back in reality, both of them headed to the coffee corner, bought the juice they were waiting for and sat down at a table adjacent to the trio that was already there. Both gulped the first sip and looked at each other and smiled, and then went on to enjoy the drink. Few moments later K was gazing at the charm of the moon, that was unbelievably smart tonight, and was wondering whether moon should be masculine or feminine. C had a different feeling for he was still wondering about the good old days and how he would face the days that are yet to come, without friends and possibly one enemy to live with. C was doing exactly what K didn't want to do!

Each group could over hear each other's voices, none might actually know the other group's context. While this was possible, the minority group wasn't in any mood to talk, they were here to have a life outside everything else they have been doing through the day. They wanted to fill the void created by the emptiness of their daily routine with food and fruits for tonight.

The majority group, on the contrary, were here just to talk. That was their business for tonight. The group consisted of the girls P and M, and the guy J was a stranger to most people; but not to these two girls, both of them were very close to him. Typical of a passing out batch. K & C meanwhile are struck in awe at the awesomeness of the mango juice that has yet again been prepared with utmost care and given the magical touch. It was a flawlessly wonderful drink and they didn't want to think of anything else other than to be immersed in the joy of the juice. But, just then they overhear P scream.

P: "Noooo..... Not like that!" (screams!)
P: "He has been always like that, never listens to anything I say. You can try if you want."
M: "Why do you criticize him all the time ? He is not that irresponsible, I know."
J stares at both of them taking turns, shies away from both and hides his face.

K winks at C; signaling there is going to be an interesting scene developing here.

M: "How long do you know him ?". M asks.
P: "4 years are long enough, madam!", P claims.
M: "I know him since my childhood and I would bet my life on his character." M said sincerely.
J was surprised. But he hardly uttered a word.
K double winks at C!
P: "I am not saying he is bad. I just like him the way he is but he must change a little."
M fires back: "If changes he wouldn't be the same again!"
At last J speaks out : "Ladies, if I could buy your attention for a while, do I have my say in this issue? I think you both are talking about me."
P & M unanimously: "No!"
J : "No to what ? Not about me ?"
P : "No, you don't have a say in this. Just shut up!"
M clarifies: "Why don't you keep quite for a while, meanwhile we both decide how to punish you for what you have done ? Didn't you like the soft drink tonight, why don't you finish it while we settle this ?"
J: "hmmm... Ok!". And he reluctantly takes another sip, throwing away the straw that he half ate.
J shies back to silence and was looking around as if he was looking for some help.

PS: I am not sure of the quality of the post. I was just motivated to write a short-story (because Romanch Keeps on writing them here :D) and then got inspired by a situation on 8th June 2009 at 10.30 PM. Again, all the characters are real and living in IIIT-H. However the story (if something exists of that sort!) is a work of fiction.

UPDATE: This is the first chapter of the short-story series "The Nights". The follow-up post is here which is the second chapter of the series.

What is it about being right ?

What is it about being right ?

Everyone seeks to have the right set of things. The right parents, right administrator, right friends, right girlfriend('s), right work, ... most of all right life. It is so funny but even if there are some things wrong with us we tend to identify them as the right wrongs. Consider the following: I take an occasional drink, I know a drink can never get you anything, I know it can't be good for health. Now ideally I would have simply quit because it is wrong to do.

Instead, I say to myself:

"it is not good to do this, but at least it is not that bad, is it? I am only drinking once in a month or so, so that should be okay? Better than those who do it daily. At least my choice of being right at doing the wrong thing is good enough."

Not that I think what I do is wrong. Of course I am right. But why do I always have to be right ? Why not wrong ?

The right child. I have seen a case or two when parents do classify their children. "He is my better child". What better I ask? "He studies better, perhaps." Is it really so important that you need to give importance to a child who is better at studies. Are you not ignoring the other who is may be better at painting, or poetry perhaps, of which we may not even be aware of ?


The right girlfriend. Okay, here I don't have a lot of experience, neither first hand nor through someone else's eyes. But from what little I have seen, I know that looking for the right partner has always been a tough call for all and is even gender-unbiased. I have seen pairs forming and deforming umpteen times. Most funny of all are those where two pairs dis-integrate at the same time and find solace in the comfort of the person from the other pair. Thankfully they choose the opposite gender. ;-) Again, I am not saying that all these are wrong doings (Even if they choose same gender partner :P). My question is why can't we have a partner who is half right, and the rest half could be right from their point of view.


The thought behind this discussion doesn't conclude that I am going to make a wrong choice. It is just that why does it have to be right all the time ? Why does the world around you expect you to do it right?

My Obsession for Tea!

This is a topic on which I can write for the rest of my life, unless I consider quiting TEA consumption. Again the later is least possible from my current rate of consumption or the blind obsession. My history of TEA consumption is a dangerously telling tale. My warning: Please don't try this at home!

The first occasion: It was a fine morning, calm and pleasant . It used to be a burning welcome to my day otherwise. That day was different, really unusually pleasant for a July morning, and I bet I wasn't willing to wake from bed. I had no clue of what was going around me. There were guests at home, but no I wasn't going to wake up today (I told you it was an unusual day!). My parents sometimes debate as to who brought me the first cup of tea, they throw blame on each other as usual. But I am pretty sure my mom was the culprit. :D My uncle had to go back to work and wanted to meet me before he left. My mom got me the cup of tea and I woke up mostly because of the warmth of the TEA cup.

Season Ticket: I had tasted tea very early (I aged 11-12 back then. Okay, comparatively early!). But it took me 2-3 years more before I became serious about it. I was in 9th class I think, and I had an exam I was scared to attend. The reasoning is the usual "I don't know anything!" stuff. I woke up early morning (4 AM) and grind well before I went to school. I did well in the exam, which sort of gave me the license to consume more tea under the guise of studying early morning. I never realized that I was buying the season ticket for Tea. From then on I never stopped.

Canteen @ CVR. Our college didn't boast of the finest of canteens that anyone has seen. But it was a decent place to hangout for us all. I can't exactly recollect my daily dosage but I remember I used to take tea from Ramesh (canteen wala) daily early morning, then after the first hour, at lunch, at 3 PM, and sometimes at the end of sports session in the evening. The reference to Ramesh is important here. He used to get us tea, samosa off-the counter as well. How many outside our batch know this? Thanks to Chetan (509), Phani (Uncle, 532), Amarnath (Katharnak, 505) I drenched in tea all day long. :-)

Coffee Shop @ IIIT Hyderabad. This is one place I wouldn't forget for various reasons. But one certain thing would be the double tea that is available there. Never before had I got the opportunity to consume tea in that quantity. Bloody hell, it is just a machine made tea. So what ? It is tea.
Today some of my friends and definitely my family members are not allowing me to consume tea. Sadly for my family, I won't get up without a tea. :D
They just can't stop me. By now I have even consumed 3 "double teas" consecutively, though just once.

Okay but why did I write about this ? Just for fun. I had nothing better to do. And I have been pondering about this for a while, so why not ? ;-)

On "Deterministic Nostalgia"- the title of the blog

Few of my friends who (already!) frequent my blog have been repeatedly asking this one question:

What does "Deterministic Nostalgia" mean ? Why this title ?

With this post I am trying to answer them.


First and foremost I have already written about my affinity towards cyber creatures like Googlebot (or Slurp). And in this case I had observed that there isn't a phrase "Deterministic Nostalgia" among all the billions of pages that Google indexes. See below:






Second, "How many times do you want to recollect about something you had thought long back and now are not able to reproduce ?"

Third, "Most of the times what I write in this blog is about what I have already experienced or thought about. So in essence I am forcing (deterministically) my thoughts (mostly nostalgic, at least so far!) on issues in life.


Justified ?
For me the first reason was enough. I solved the problem by creating appropriate content.

NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month

Most of you might not be aware of NaNoWriMo. Every year in November the aspiring novelists, established novelists, and some not-so novelists (like me) unite to write (individually) a 50,000 word novel in the span of the month. The beauty of this approach is brute force writing. Just pen your thoughts (or actually key them in this case!), and just go on. No editing, No re-editing, No organization or re-organization etc. You might want to do it, but you just need not. Just reach 50,000 words of original content in a month and you are done. You will then be called NaNoWriMo winner. You receive a web certificate and a web badge too! :D

Following content has been copied from the official website.

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What is NaNoWriMo?

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

So, to recap:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.

Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

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This year, there will be a few computer science researchers too. What better than procrastination ?
Count me in.


Personal NaNoWriMo History.

It was the year 2005 that I first found this website. I registered that year and wrote about 1,000 words in a few days. "Not bad", I thought. And I retired. I had to retire because I had already messed up with 3 of my exams of B.Tech 4th year 1st semester. This year there won't be any exams, and I hope nothing else comes up meanwhile which could stop me from writing. I want to finish this time. As a sportsman I don't like to loose. Not without competing!

Nostalgic -- Yours Truly!

I, me, myself. I was all alone, and I couldn't bear it anymore.
3 years have passed and I have been here long enough. I looked at people around me, almost everyone changed their residence or at least rooms. I hadn't done both. Now I have moved away from 348, OBH, IIIT Hyderabad to my home.

It has been difficult decision to make. Life without 'football', 'basketball', 'DC++' is not going to be the same but at least (I think) I can work better if I become a day scholar.

I remember the first day of our stay in campus. Our arrival. Me and Ravitej confused and wondering about a lot of things here. I still remember the days of BC in "Room 40 OBH", those never ending games of TT on the first floor OBH, the game of football for which I waited every evening, the fascination towards those Basketballers around, the fielding I have done in the cricket field, ...

And as I saw Ravitej, Mahesh, Anil, and others leave campus an year back. And recently when Pankaj (John Rambo) and Sai (Spidey) left campus I had no choice but to leave my self.


No, I won't write more. I am not writing that is all.


zEro Signing off!

The art of Procrastination

As of now, at this very moment, I was supposed to be writing bits and pieces of code that may not make any difference to anybody, or I should have been writing bits or pieces of technical content that would make no difference to humankind, except that some individual would get his thesis approved someday.

Then what am I doing here ? Why am I writing this post oblivious of the fact that I could do something potentially more useful to myself, if not others! As I write this statement I am thinking, "I am actually doing the right thing. Doing what I want to do, at this point of time.". While it may not be true (and it actually might be!), I am justifying the purpose of the post as an understanding of what I truly want, or where I truly belong. Despite this justification I have had a few questions:

1. Why do I choose to write a blog-post instead of doing something more active or more funny (or even more romantic perhaps!) ?
2. If I truly believe that writing the blog-post is the right thing, then why do I ever have to write a thesis (or a piece of code as mentioned earlier) ? Why not just keep blogging on various topics that are of great interest to me or you (the reader) or at the very least Googlebot (or Slurp) ?
   

The first question will be answered a little later, for that needs more thought than I had anticipated.
Coming to the second question, I happened to ask myself another associated question: "Do I really believe that writing this blog-post is the right thing ?" Well if i could answer this then the later part of the second question is almost answered by itself. Because If I believe it is the right thing then I'd write the thesis at any other point of time and still get the degree (MS by Research in computer science) at the end of 2009. And if I don't think this (blogging) is the right thing to do at this point of time then I wouldn't have been doing it anyway, and instead would have written that piece of code or that piece of thesis that would fetch me my degree (still) only at the end of 2009. And the statement at the end of the second question that questions my intentions to keep posting on this blog is bogus as I have never ruled it out, especially in the interest of Googlebot, Slurp and others.

Now, coming back to the first question, I think I have figured out why I should be writing this post. Well, I already wrote it, didn't I ? You could see I am not writing about dogs in the playground, kittens in your bedroom, or technology at your doorsteps. I am here writing about the constructive (or destructive) use of a destructive (or constructive) word called Procrastination without actually using the word more than once!
Coming to the alternatives to writing this post as questioned by myself "doing something more active or more funny (or even more romantic!)", I think I cracked the code. I should undoubtedly do all these and more things, but instead why not just blog about those more active or more funny ( or even more romantic!) topics of interest as well ?

• PS: I can sense in myself a feeling of satisfaction and achievement as i wrote this post on a topic of mutual interest (to me and Googlebot again!), in exactly 1 hour, 1 minute and 1second. Some timing, this one has got!

• PS2: I made up the last part of PS. 1 hour and 1 minute was reasonably approximately correct. :-)

One-liners from Reviews

As I have told before the paper that is now an accepted publication at ACL-IJCNLP 2009 went through 9 review cycles. At each one of those I have received some abusive reviews. At some of them I also received wonderfully positive reviews (with a sugar candy attached to it). At all of them I received neutral reviews (Yes, all of them!).

I thought I could share with you some of the most abusive, some of the most sweet and some stupidly neutral reviews (which won't help an acceptance or rejection or betterment of the paper!). What follows are quotes from the reviews and I hope the reviewers themselves won't read this some day. ;-) It doesn't matter to me at all, they were all anonymous so if they flame me that means they are revealing their identity. :D

Abusive

• I was, unfortunately, unable to identify the particular contribution that this paper makes to this body of literature.
• First, I was unable to determine exactly what the authors meant by "query focus" in their discussion.
• The paper studies the role of query-relevance in multi-document summarization, and makes several findings: (1) ..... (2) ........ (3) .......
• I find (1) and (2) particularly trivial and not very interesting
• Finding (3) is perhaps less expected, though still makes quite a bit of sense.
• I believe that this paper should not be accepted for publication because the experiments described do not support in any way the authors’ aim – which is to determine whether or not query focus affects sentence selection in MDS.
• The feature suggested is trivial and does not add anything to the set of features already in use in extractive summarisation. The authors ignore decades of research in IR aimed at finding non-obvious matches of query-terms.
• The observations made in Table 2 are not only trivial and non-surprising, but even absurd.
• This paper is quite confusing. I was not always entirely sure of the point it was trying to make.
• Modeling this as a likelihood is interesting, but perhaps complicates the issue somewhat (presumably a simple count of proportions, which can also be tested statistically, would do?)
• This is not particularly surprising. Some discussion (even speculative) of the implications of this -- i.e. what are the humans doing that the systems are not -- would make this poster much more interesting.
• I think the fundamental notion behind this paper is sound and interesting, but a lot of the analysis is flawed.
• Theoretical analyses of data sets used in past work are also interesting, especially if they are thoroughly studied and written up well, but this paper tends to be somewhat hard to read and doesn't (at least to this reviewer) yield an "a ha!" moment at the end.
• The results seem obvious, and the question does not seem to justify the effort involved in quantifying the differences in query bias between human and automated summaries. Some aspects of the data and the method are questionable.
• The methodology used in the paper is not wrong, but the outcomes are rather obvious and it is difficult how the findings can prove useful to the research community.
• One of the conclusions is that computers and humans use different strategies to produce summaries. This is well-known and it is not necessary to use statistics for this. The authors try to suggest that the difference between human summarisation and automatic summarisation is the way a query is handled, but no support for this claim is offered.
• This paper deals with an interesting issue which is the distinction between query-focused and query-biased summarization. However, it fails for several main reasons:
• It fails to define the problem and to make the distinction between the query-focused and query-biased summarization. The problem itself is ill-defined.
• the methods used and the formalization are weak.
• the justification is irrelevant
• the results are too lousy and there is no funding at all.
  

Sweet

• This is interesting work. You need to stay focused in the conclusions and indicate the significance for automatic text summarisation of feature analysis as a predictor of content.
• This is an interesting paper. Using the appropriate literature, the paper analyzes the role of query focus in summarization performance on the DUC 2007 task. The analysis is insightful and could become a standard reference, if the presentation of the experiments was clearer and their interpretation less confusing.
• Sect 6.3: this is the ultimate insight of this paper, please elaborate!
• Clearly-written paper on an important topic. The gap between human and machine produced summaries is very interesting.
• The work is interesting, supported with good evidence and is well presented. I support its inclusion in the conference as a short paper.
• The paper is very well written, and provides a useful comparison between human and machine approaches to query focused automatic summarisation.

Neutral

• I particularly liked the introduction of an equiprobable summarizer, which allows the impact of query-focus to be observed in a system setting, in addition to observations from the existing data sources.
• This definitely an interesting and worthwhile topic -- and one that has attracted plenty of attention from researchers working in both the MDS and QA communities.
  
• While I commend the authors for noting that their results will not be of use to systems that are performing well, the results seem to me to be too weak in general to be of interest.
• The investigation reported is interesting, but in some sense it is obvious.
• The conclusion is interesting, however, not surprising.

I have (now) no complaints about any of the reviews. Some of the abusive reviews were not wrong after all, it is correct from their point-of-view, their context. Of course the one I would want to fight against is the last abusive statement above. If the reviewer doesn't understand the problem then it is his problem partly, he can't have high confidence on his reviews, can he ? Anyway, this post is only to show the variation in human perception about what they read. Everybody has had their judgment. Everybody gave their verdict. But what is the truth ? Whether or not this paper is useful to the research community can be decided a few years from now based on whether or not someone cites it outside our group. I am patient enough to wait. :-)


PS: There is a marginally related discussion on natural language processing blog: How to reduce reviewing overhead?

PS2: There is another recent related discussion on the corpora-list where Adam Kilgarriff raised issues over the current process of reviewing and accused it of wastage of time. Others responded rather critically saying "There is no other simpler way to get author feedback and no known simple way to get away from awful reviewing!".

PS3: Another post on the art of reviewing seems worthy now. May be I will come back with it some day.

What has IPL (or 20-20 cricket) done to us ?

I have been wondering over the past one year what the Indian Premier League (IPL) has done to all of us. It has changed our understanding (or the lack of) of the game of cricket, it created a sense of attachment to more than one team (Our favorites are now distributed all over the place!). Most of all it has mesmerized us. We are struck in awe at the pace of the game; the pace at which runs are scored, or the pace at which a team crumbles. Both of which were a rarity in the One Day Internationals (then termed as Limited Over Internationals (LOI), I wonder how limited does 20 over cricket get), while almost non-existant when speaking of Test match cricket. Common man gets home tired from (or of) his job to relax a few hours before he gets to sleep. He deserves the rest as he needs to rebuild his body for his daily battles of tomorrow.
Regardless of profession, however, everybody seems to be involved in Cricket and more importantly in IPL. I have seen those who never played or even saw cricket watch this newer format of 20-20. But what are the implications of IPL (or 20-20 cricket in general) ?

In this post I try to describe a few, very few implications. Others views could be seen in comments.
Firstly, as we go into making this more serious form of cricket, players are shortening their career because of the un-conventional styles they need to adapt to suit 20-20 cricket. The original idea of having the correct technique is based on simple principles of perfect balance, economy of movement and precision in stroke making. Today however, we see wild bat swings just to showcase that they can score at will. Little do these kids know that they are changing the natural body movement to accomodate more runs or quicker deliveries.
In this sense, I like Akash Chopra, he doesn't change one bit playing a Test Match, ODI or even a 20-20 International. He just sucks equally bad at all of these.

And coming back to the viewers point of view, we have stopped watching cricket. I mean the game of cricket. We just want our teams to win. It doesn't matter if they play good cricket or not. Fielding turns aggressive and for the good. But many still don't buy my argument because I would be pleased only on the day when a fielder who can bat well would be considered an all-rounder. In not doing so, we are almost wantedly keeping away crickets most important people from getting to limelight. Well if a new 20-20 bat can be used then why not recognize fielders having their specific purpose. Southafrica had a great all-rounder in Jhonty rhodes in the good old days. Now they have another all-rounder in AB De Villiers. India, doesn't have. No argument here.


Viewers, instead of taking much needed rest to their minds and souls are watching this game showing their fanatism (and sometimes fantasy-ism as explained later) are getting further tired. Further they don't sleep well as some wake up in the middle of the night when they realize they haven't made substitution or selected their trump player. Lets end it here saying, 20-20 format is doing good to some young cricketers in the world but not to cricket or viewers, in the long term.


Back to viewers again, I have seen a lot of people (myself included) who want their respective bunch of 11 to play well. No team to support ? No, they have their fantasy teams to support. They don't care if Delhi Daredevils win or so do Deccan Chargers, all they want is the following players to perform well: Pradeep Sangwan, Ashish Nehra, RP Singh, AB De Villiers, Adam Gilchrist and Rohit sharma. Why ? Which team do they support ? No fanatism here, only fantasy!

What does a purist like me do in a fast changing world where the change isn't so good. Move on.


PS: I still like gilly smacking the ball around tearing the bowling apart. I thoroughly enjoyed his 85 out of 35 balls against Delhi Daredevils. Remember, barring one or two shots in those 35 balls everything else was conventional stroke-play.
PS2: It is not that I don't like big scores or good run-rate or the adrenaline rush it generates. I just don't like not-so-conventional ways to get to them all.
PS 3: Welcome back, World T20 is already here!

The Journey to ACL

Alright. To start writing on a positive note, I would say "Eureka!!".

The Eureka moment of my life
I was about to go out for dinner that evening. When Surya finds me rather restless while he had some words to share with me.
He said "Your paper has been accepted, right ?".
I thought he was referring to the HLT-NAACL CLIA Workshop paper which got accepted 2 months back.
Then he reiterated "Congratulations! You have done it in ACL".

I closed my eyes in disbelief , opened up again, breathing harder now and asked him not to joke. He said "Check for yourself at the website". I did check it there and was almost crying in happiness. There was a different kind of pain I was addressing suddenly. I was relieved of a lot of pain and that was the reason of this unknown pain. Oh, I was crazy! I must have chanted "ACL....ACL" a few thousand times that night. :D

No doubt, I was happy. :-)

PS: For those who are unaware of ACL, it stands for the Association of Computational Linguistics. The premiere conference of our area of research. There hasn't been a single indian university publication in ACL since 1993. Then, it was Dr Sangal's publication I heard. Last year somebody from IIT-B had a publication, I have heard (not confirmed). And now it was me. :-)

The Midnight oil
This work started from a poster that I saw at IJCNLP last year in Hyderabad. Something struck me at that time in that poster. The poster was by Shilpa Arora (to my memory!). The poster was a little too simple or the explanation wasn't too convincing, that I wasn't impressed with the work. But that is how I thought about a few things at that time. That work is no way related to this my current work, but I somehow still feel that my initial thoughts started because of my disappointment at that poster presentation.

I continuously pondered over the initial ideas but had no one to discuss my points. I had nothing to claim. I just had a few observations by then. All of which would be rubbed off saying "trivial". (Ironically, even one of the ACL reviews mentioned it "Trivial", yet he found it necessary to be included!)

Then started my work independently but I never had the habit of being isolated. I drew upon Suman's habit of staying up late night and used him as a pseudo-Reviewer. Every night I would take him to the white board and explain what I think. Most of the times I repeated myself. This process brought a lot of clarity on my subject. He almost never asked questions but when he did they were usually good. Especially because they came from a person who had no idea what I was going to do with the data at hand.

Suman went away and I submitted the paper to EMNLP 2008, to start with.

End-of-Cycle
To start with I sent the paper to EMNLP 2008. But later on due to the rejects (mostly rightly so!) I kept on sending it to each and every conference that was in my path. I ended up sending the paper to 9 conferences in all. Starting with EMNLP 2008 and ending with EMNLP 2009. Having said that EMNLP 2009 was just a formality to mark the end of cycle.

EMNLP 2008 --> ICON 2008-->ECIR 2009 --> EACL 2009 --> HLT-NAACL 2009 --> SIGIR 2009 --> RANLP 2009 --> ACL-IJCNLP 2009 --> EMNLP 2009.

At ACL-IJCNLP the journey ended peacefully. I had submitted the paper as a single authored short paper and is now an accepted publication.

The role of a mentor
In november 2008, I saw a mail on SIGIR-list. SIGIR 2008 Mentorship program it read. The idea is that senior program committee members could help/mentor junior researchers from unprivileged institutions like ours where there aren't any senior people who could help. This was of some hope to me as I knew that my paper needed major revisions and smoother polishing before I can send to a good place. SIGIR was the right choice. I was handed over to Dr Charles L A Clarke, Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. After over 50 conversations including reviews, questions and answers I ended up in a draft that was indeed smooth and soothing to the eye. I submitted to SIGIR poster (which again was suggested by Charlie himself. Thank you!). It got rejected, but that step had changed my own perspective of the whole work. I was thinking from new point of view, I now had new vocabulary to explain the terms. Reviews from SIGIR were equally important they gave me the right foundation as to what I should do before the next submission. I took the reviews seriously and used them thoroughly to extend it to ACL short paper.


Thanking my colleagues!
I never got the chance to thank all my colleagues who helped me mature this paper to the current level or those of them who continuously read each of my innumerable drafts and gave their valuable feedback. I would like to thank Sowmya, Prasad, Swathi, Praneeth, Santosh, Vasu and Chandan for reading my paper and for their inputs (if any!). I would also like to thank some colleagues outside lab Sai Satya, Mahesh Mohan etc who gave their helping hand when in need. Thanks Mahesh for those un-conventional thoughts, I am treasuring them!



PS: The first title I gave to this post was : "From Kondapur to Singapur ". True isn't it ? Why? You'd do good to know that ACL-IJCNLP 2009 is going to be held in Singapore. And by the way, I am going to attend it.

PS2: Considering the events that are happening around me now, there could be more posts on ACL soon. Some more positive publicity to ACL and perhaps negative publicity to some others!

Here is a cache copy of the accepted papers page. (I am hoping that ACL-IJCNLP doesn't have a problem with this.)

And I Blog Again!

Three years back, a rather aggressive yet shy sportsman posted his first post on his Weblog. He still considers that piece of writing to be on one of the most intriguing topics he'd still want to write on. His writing skills at the time were bizarre and his understanding of life were questionable to say the least.

Later that year he joined IIIT hyderabad, he wanted to keep blogging and keep his friends updated on most happenings of his life through the blog. To a reasonable extent he was successful. He used this blog to report on various aspects of his "current" life. From his current sports events at IIIT-H to his passionate fanaticism towards Sourav Ganguly, his travel to helsinki, and his experiences on spending money there.

Unfortunately, however, being under the cover of an emotional outburst, one fine evening he decided against blogging forever (he thought!). He was visibly upset, but at something that had nothing to do with the blog. On another not-so-fine day, he declared himself unfit to write blog-posts anymore. He still wonders why!

This blog is a question, that answers all the previous questions on why I shouldn't blog. Well I am not exactly going to answer that question, however, I would ask more questions and more importantly keep blogging forever this time (hopefully!).

I hope this current blog would be more matured in its content and the thought process involved in the background than the previous ones listed above. I also hope that any post in this blog doesn't offend any human (living or dead or otherwise!), in so much that I would have to regret. And even if it does offend somebody this is an open disclaimer stating "I don't care!"

PS: This post comes exactly 3 years after my first blog-post ever. Yes, it comes after 3 years, 0 days , 0 hours, 0 minutes and perhaps 0 seconds.

PS2: Meanwhile, I'd also like you to know that I have started another blog which deals with a different kind of writing. I hope I could impress a few using this hidden talent of mine. :-)