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Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP


June, 2024
(co-located with NAACL)

About

Call for papers

Accepted papers

Program

Sponsors

Organization

Invited Speakers

Program Committee

Insights 2023

Insights 2022

Insights 2021

Insights 2020

Why negative results?

Publication of negative results is difficult in most fields, but in NLP the problem is exacerbated by the near-universal focus on improvements in benchmarks. This situation implicitly discourages hypothesis-driven research, and it turns creation and fine-tuning of NLP models into art rather than science. Furthermore, it increases the time, effort, and carbon emissions spent on developing and tuning models, as the researchers have no opportunity to learn what has already been tried and failed.

This workshop invites both practical and theoretical unexpected or negative results that have important implications for future research, highlight methodological issues with existing approaches, and/or point out pervasive misunderstandings or bad practices. In particular, the most successful NLP models currently rely on different kinds of pretrained meaning representations (from word embeddings to Transformer-based models like BERT and GPT-3). To complement all the success stories, it would be insightful to see where and possibly why they fail. Any NLP tasks are welcome: sequence labeling, question answering, inference, dialogue, machine translation - you name it.

A successful negative results paper would contribute one of the following:

The Workshop for Insights from Negative Results invites short papers as well as non-archival abstract submissions for papers published elsewhere (e.g. in one of the main conferences or in non-NLP venues). Our goal is to provide not only a publication venue, but an opportunity to discuss the most urgent methodological issues, and to think about where the field is going.

Thank you to all those who are sponsoring Insights Workshop 2024.