Reluctant junketeering

The Friday before Easter, I had my dissertation turned into the library. This is not news. The following week, which Nicole and Rachel spent in Baltimore, I spent back in Pittsburgh working during the day, and working in the evenings on an eight-page version of my 200-page thesis for the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), or LMNOP, as the spouses like to call it. This is the same conference at which I published my Google internship paper last year.

I had the paper pretty much finished by the time we left for France, and only spent a few hours of my vacation trying to make a few revisions that my advisor suggested a little too late. Submissions were due Friday, May 1, which was our picnic day on Garlaban.

Reviewing for the conference, in which I participated, was between May 7 and May 22. This was immediately followed by an author response period over Memorial Day weekend. Relatively unusual among conferences, this allows the authors to correct factual errors and respond to questions that the reviewers may have had, after which the reviewers can adjust their scores.

On Monday, June 1, I received word that my paper was accepted to the conference. That gave me until Friday, June 12 to perform all the revisions that we promised the reviewers in our response to them. Nicole and Rachel left for Mississippi Tuesday evening, so between then and 3am Saturday morning (the deadline was Pacific time), I spent nearly all of my free time writing and running additional code, and shoring up the paper, with a new section on prior work, pseudocode for my algorithm, new results that weren't available for the first draft, and additional statistical significance tests, among other things.

It kind of feels like I've been working on this stuff forever. But at least for now the pressure is off a little bit. I will have to starting working on the conference talk soon—the conference is the first week of August. I also want to make some changes to my software so I can make it publicly available in time for the conference.

EMNLP is co-located with ACL-IJCNLP this year, in Singapore. I'm mildly excited about the exotic location, but looking forward very little to the travel time. We also can't afford to make a family vacation out of it, which is unfortunate.