(Written at end of summer 2022 – last semester of 1st-year PhD)
ACL 2022 was less daunting and more exciting than I expected. In fact, after the one-week conference, I felt recharged! This post shares what I experienced at my biggest (so far) in-person NLP conference post-pandemic.
Initially, I wasn’t planning to attend ACL in person. I held myself with a ridiculously unreasonable expectation: only attend ACL if I have a first-authored paper published in its main proceeding. This was my ego and Imposter’s syndrome talking, and I am really glad that I didn’t listen to them in the end. Another reason is that since my F1 visa has expired, if I were to leave the US, I would need to return to Malaysia afterward to renew the visa.
I appreciate my advisor Steve persuading me to participate in this conference in person. Given that our involvement with BigScience has culminated in the PromptSource demo paper and a language adaptation workshop paper, and the requirement of the in-person demo presentation, we both agreed that it would be a great idea that I help out with the presentation and meet other BigScience folks in real life.
After making the decision, I rushed to book flight tickets and accommodation, which was a stressful process because there weren’t many options left. I also had to call embassies in Ireland and Malaysia to figure out how to return to the USA (due to COVID policies). To put things in context, ACL 2022 took place in late May, and I only started my travel arrangement at the start of May. Fortunately, as a Malaysian, I did not need any visa to visit the country.
Eventually, everything worked out in my favor. Even though I stayed at a hotel 30 minutes (by bus and train) away from the main venue, Dublin is a charming and accessible city. In hindsight, attending the conference in person was a great idea–––I had a lot of learning opportunities, met with potential collaborators working on the same research problem, and enjoyed the company at the conference.
Isn’t Dublin beautiful? I loved taking the 30-minute evening walk back to my hotel along the river after the conference every day.
I learned that it’s quite common for NLP conferences to start on Sunday. Usually, the tutorials take place on the first day, posters and talks from the second to the fourth day, and workshops on the last two days. I bring up about Sunday because we had to scramble to find a printing shop in Dublin as our in-person presentation (for the demo paper) is on Monday. Since most of them were closed on weekends, we emailed a print shop on Saturday, and my co-presenter Victor could barely retrieve the poster 30 minutes before our session.
For the demo presentation, it was more casual than I expected. We had a table, a monitor, and a few chairs. When people came, we walked them through the functionality of the PromptSource tool, and it’s great knowing that people were interested in using it to create prompts – they just were not sure how to use it with their custom datasets.
Demo booths in general were less crowded than I expected. Most people were hanging around the posters for the long and short papers. In my opinion, the conference should organize the demo presentations better. When we arrived, we fumbled for around 20 minutes (alongside the kind volunteers) in the hall to find our booth to finally realize that none of the demo presenters were assigned a designated booth number. Later on, I was even asked by some attendees whether the demo booths were a part of the job fairs .
The PromptSource demo went super well! I was copresenting it with Victor (on the far left).
My second presentation on Friday was a virtual presentation at the BigScience workshop. Before the presentation, I saw a recent Tweet complaining about the virtual format of the presentation; combined with my friends’ disappointing accounts of the virtual format, I was concerned for the lack of interactions during the presentation. I actually looked forward to having meaningful discussions about multilingual NLP at ACL because there isn’t a huge emphasis on such research topics from where I am studying.
Fortunately, more people than expected showed up to the workshop, and some were interested in the work of adapting BigScience open-source multilingual models to unseen languages. Vassilina (my co-author/co-presenter on far left) and I were happy to know where to focus our efforts, what related research problems people are working on, and how our project plays into the big picture of multilingual NLP.
My first virtual poster session went really well. We gained some insights on what research problems people care about. I was sitting in the venue and putting my laptop on my lap, which explains the shaky blurry image of me.
Tutorials and panel talks are good avenues to understand the big picture. As a researcher in my early stage, oftentimes I find it difficult to understand why certain papers and concepts are significant for the field. Furthermore, the NLP field experiences an inundation of preprint papers in recent years. Tutorials help me navigate what experienced researchers identify as the important takeaways and future research trends. For instance, after attending the tutorial “Zero- and Few-Shot NLP with Pretrained Language Models”, I learned about how the community should perceive the release of new model designs for zero-shot learning by taking into considerations of the trade-offs between compute and performance and how important dataset design –- an overlooked aspect until now –- is for prompting language models.