Bob Carpenter (carp@research.bell-labs.com)
Tue, 9 Dec 1997 12:25:30 -0500 (EST)
Karel Oliva writes: > But to come to the point: as for (as Shalom puts it) "the audience > consist(ing) of formal and computational linguists who are open to our > approach", I have to say that following some funny experience I am somehow > less enthusiastic. Please please please don't let one funny review spoil your taste for exporting ideas of HPSG to the rest of the world. I've gotten 'funny' reviews from all sorts of places, but I didn't, for instance, give up on ACL after one try. After all, reviewing is a rather quirky process. Program committees don't sit in dark rooms these days and have long, scholarly discussions about papers and how they fit in with the theme or focus of the conference. Instead, papers get sent out to two or three people who read them on the bus and scraw replies into their email buffers. The program chairs then correlate responses and take the n-best for inclusion. And 'n-best' is relative to who reviewed them. > For those who risked not to do so, I have to say (second) that Drew > Moshier, Sabine Lehmann and myself proposed a paper to FG 97, and got the I had a paper rejected from ACL saying 'I should read Carpenter's book!'. And of course, there's no time to explain how the result about negation and its computation eluded me in the book and how it's really new, but of course it looks like the old stuff because I wanted to prove it in the book and didn't. Instead, I bit the bullet, took consolation in the fact that someone at least looked at my book long enough to see the connection tot he paper, and then sent the paper elsewhere. > With (once more) all respect to the freedom of speech of the reviewers (and > to the fact that the individual reviewing was blind - but hardly the final > decision of the chairperson(s) of the Program Committee to forward such a > review), it seems to me to be rather exaggerated a statement to say that > Drew does not understand the technical perspective of HPSG and that his > statements about feature structures are patently false ... or, in the case > it is not exaggerated, it seems to be a proof of the level of openness of > the FG people to our approach :-) I don't think it's a lack of open-ness at all. And you can't expect open-ness to be a one-way street. Proponents of HPSG have been no kinder to other theories than the proponents of those theories have been to HPSG (well, most people just ignore each other, so don't read 'the proponents' generically). Witness Ivan's slides mocking GB derivations, his examples aimed directly at showing (some versions of) CG's weaknesses, etc. I think those kinds of discussions are useful, and I believe I'm guilty of the same kind of slinging (but like a good politician, I sling mud at both HPSG and CG and get hit with it from both sides, too!). So I guess I'm calling for more open-ness all around. - Bob PS I didn't have anything to do with organizing any of these conferences, but think it's good to combine them in an effort to (1) educate each other, and (2) cut down on the number of conferences.
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