
Best Paper Awards at ACL 2020 - polm23
https://acl2020.org/blog/ACL-2020-best-papers/
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lazyjeff
If anyone likes checking out other lists of best paper awards, I've been
collecting them (with the help of a few individuals and AllenAI) at
[https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/](https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/)

There's 29 top CS conferences there with best papers since 1996. And NeurIPS
and ICSA will be added soon...

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pabo
What an interesting collection, thanks!

It's kind of surprising to me that Microsoft Research is the all-time leader,
gathering more best paper awards than any top university. Wow. This in itself
tells a story about Microsoft Research.

Do you happen to have a time series on this? Would be interesting to see the
trends in your data, e.g. to check how industrial research fares vs. academic
research as a function of time. (There are some theories suggesting that
industrial research is in a general decline [0]. Though the "best paper
awards" metric is surely far from being perfect, it might still be viable as a
proxy for corporate research performance.)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672)

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lazyjeff
Thanks for the comments. I don't have it in time-series format. You could
scrape the page pretty easily to get it (even just a grep should get you most
of what you want). I'm not sure if the N is big enough per year to give a
reliable trend graph, but you're welcome to try.

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nl
GAIA: A Fine-grained Multimedia Knowledge Extraction System[1] looks pretty
impressive. It's a huge amount of work they have done there - I guess DARPA
funding buys a big team. The source is all available[2] but looks like a fair
amount of work to get running.

[1] [https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-
demos.11/](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-demos.11/)

[2] [https://github.com/GAIA-AIDA](https://github.com/GAIA-AIDA)

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not_a_moth
Thanks for posting. I was curious on "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form,
and Understanding...". Interesting that a best paper award was given to a
philosophical paper on distinction between meaning and form.

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sqrt17
every couple decades, there is a new approach that promises to do solve more
of the language understanding problems with less of humans actually thinking
about and understanding the inner workings of language. Each time we get a
phenomenon which is best described with the hype cycle analogy, namely
consistent progress of what it can do, along with even faster progress of what
people expect from the technique, until the actual progress cannot keep up
with expectations and we settle at a new (much progressed but much
disillusioned) level.

BERT, GPT-2 and now GPT-3 have brought us to the tail end of such a hype
cycle, with the most enthusiastic DNN enthusiasts still claiming that it's
understanding meaning and general AI isn't far off, whereas the folks who give
out ACL Best Paper awards (all long-time experts in their field) probably sigh
and are thankful for a paper that breaks with the hype and tells the
overenthusiasts that there's still stuff left to understand and discover.

Do we need mediocre philosophical papers when we can have mediocre technical
papers (or even fairly decent technical papers) instead? Hell no. But do we
occasionally need a good and thoughtful philosophical paper to sober ourselves
up? Admittedly yes.

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teraflop
I haven't read past the abstract, but "Tangled up in BLEU: Reevaluating the
Evaluation of Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics" is an
_excellent_ title.

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nl
Great title and a great problem to work on.

