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.)