The process of peer review, when functioning at its best, ensures that work that is published in archival venues is carefully vetted, such that the results likely to be reliable and the presentation of those results interpretable by scholars in the field at large. But what does “peer review” mean for an interdisciplinary field? Who are the relevant “peers”? We believe that for both goals—vetting reliability of results and vetting readability of presentation—reviewing in an interdisciplinary field ideally involves reviewers coming from different perspectives.

In our particular context, we had the added (near-)novelty of our keyword-based area assignment system. (Near-novelty, because this was pioneered by NAACL 2016.) This means our areas are not named, but rather emerge from the clusters of both reviewer interests and paper topics. On the upside, this means that really popular topics (“semantics”, or “MT”) can be spread across areas, such that we don’t have area chairs scrambling for large numbers of additional reviewers. On the downside, the areas can’t be named until the dust has settled, so reviewers don’t necessarily have a clear sense of which area (in the traditional sense) they are assigned to. In addition, interests that were very popular and therefore not highly discriminative (e.g. “MT”) weren’t given very much weight alone by the clustering algorithm.

During the bidding process, we had a handful of requests from reviewers to change areas (really a small number, considering the overall size of the reviewing pool!). These requests came in three types. First, there were a few who just said: There’s relatively little in this area that I feel qualified to review, could I try a different area? In all cases, we were able to find another area that was a better match.

Second, there were reviewers who said “My research interest is X, and I don’t see any papers on X in my area. I only want to review papers on X.” We found these remarks a little surprising, as our understanding of the field is that it is not a collection of independent areas that don’t inform each other, but rather a collection of ways of looking at the same very general and very pervasive phenomenon: human language and the ways in which it can be processed by computers. Indeed, we structured the keywords into multiple groups—targets, tasks, approaches, languages and genres—to increase intersection on at least a few areas of any given reviewer’s expertise. We very much hope that the majority of researchers in our field read outside their specific subfield and are open to influence from other subfields on their own.

The third type was reviewers, typically of a more linguistic than computational orientation, who expressed concern that because they aren’t familiar with the details of the models being used, they wouldn’t be able to review effectively. To these reviewers, we pointed out that it is equally important to look critically at the evaluation (what data is being used and how) and the relationship of the work to the linguistic concepts it is drawing on. Having reviewers with deep linguistic expertise is critical and both COLING and the authors very much benefit from it.

To create the best cross-field review, then, it helps to examine each of one’s strengths and compare these with the multiple facets presented by any paper. No single reviewer is likely to be expert in every area and aspect of a manuscript; but, there’s a good chance that, as long as some care has been applied to matching, there will be some crossover expertise. Be bold with that expertise. And indeed, the coverage of knowledge that multiple reviewers have is often complementary. As a reviewer, you can bring some knowledge to reviewing at least one aspect of a paper—more so than others sharing the workload—even if that is not the aspect initially expected.

With a conference the size of COLING, managing conflicts of interest in the reviewing process is a challenge. Below, we sketch our COI handling policy, in the interest of transparency. In all cases, our goals are to maintain the fairness and integrity of the double-blind review process while also making sure that our hard-working volunteer program committee members can still also submit to COLING.

reviewer <> author

Softconf will automatically COI any reviewers from the same institution as an author.  In addition, in the bidding phase, we will ask reviewers to indicate any COIs that were not automatically caught. When ACs match reviewers to papers, this will be done so as to avoid COIs.

AC <> author

Any paper for which an AC has a COI (beyond being simply sharing affiliation) will be handled by rerouting the paper to another area. Here we’re talking about papers authored by ACs, their students, or other close collaborators. Since the areas are emergent (rather than strictly defined a priori) we anticipate it being relatively straightforward to find the area that is the next best match for all such papers. For papers authored by ACs themselves, this is relatively straightforward to detect. Beyond that, we will be asking ACs to identify any such COI papers as we assign papers to areas.

PC chair <> author

Perhaps the trickiest case is COIs involving the PC co-chairs ourselves. Neither of us are submitting our own papers to the COLING main conference. (Workshops, being handled entirely separately, are fair game in principle.) However, the fact that we’ve taken on this role shouldn’t prevent our students and other close collaborators from submitting to COLING. In this case, the entire process (including assignment to an area or possibly the “Special Circumstances” ACs, assignment to reviewers, and final accept/reject decision) will be overseen by our counterpart in conjunction the General Chair, Pierre Isabelle. This way, we still ensure that two people are present at every level of chairing.

At COLING 2018, we require submitted work to follow the Vancouver Convention on authorship – i.e. who gets to be an author on a paper. This guest post by Željko Agić of ITU Copenhagen introduces the topic.

Who gets to author a paper? A note on the Vancouver recommendations

One of the basic principles of publishing scientific research is that research papers are authored and signed by researchers.

Recently, the tenet of authorship has sparked some very interesting discussions in our community. In light of the increased use of preprint servers, we have been questioning the *ACL conference publication workflows. These mostly had to do with the peer review biases, but also with authorship: Should we enable blind preprint publications?

The notion of unattributed publications mostly does not sit well with researchers. We do not even know how to cite such papers, while we can invoke entire research programs in our paper narratives through a single last name.

Authorship is of crucial importance in research, and not just in writing up our related work sections. This goes without saying to all us fellow researchers. While in everyday language an author is simply a writer or an instigator of a piece of work, the question is slightly more nuanced in publishing scientific work:

• What activities qualify one for paper authorship?
• If there are multiple contributors, how should they be ordered?
• Who decides on the list of paper authors?

These questions have sparked many controversies over the centuries of scientific research. An F. D. C. Willard, short for Felis Domesticus Chester, has authored a physics paper, similar to Galadriel Mirkwood, a Tolkien-loving Afgan hound versed in medical research. Others have built on the shoulders of giants such as Mickey Mouse and his prolific group.

Yet, authorship is no laughing matter: It can make and break research careers, and its (un)fair treatment can make a difference between a wonderful research group and an uneasy one at the least. A fair and transparent approach to authorship is of particular importance to early-stage researchers. There, the tall tales of PhD students might include the following conjectures:

• The PIs in medical research just sign all the papers their students author.
• In algorithms research the author ordering is always alphabetical.
• Conference papers do not make explicit the individual author contributions.
• The first and the last author matter the most.

The curiosities and the conjectures listed above all stem from the fact that there seems to be no awareness of any standard rulebook to play by in publishing research. This in turn gives rise to the many different traditions in different fields.

Yet, there is a rulebook!

One prominent attempt to put forth a set of guidelines for determining authorship are the Vancouver Group recommendations. The Vancouver Group are the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), who in 1985 introduced a set of criteria for authorship. The criteria have seen many updates over the years, to match the latest developments in research and publishing. Their scope far surpasses the topic of authorship, and spans across the scientific publication process: reviewing, editorial work, publishing, copyright, and the like.

While the recommendations do stem from the medical field, they are nowadays broadened and thus widely adopted. The following is an excerpt from the recommendations in relation to authorship criteria.

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND

3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND

4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

(…)

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged.

(…)

These authorship criteria are intended to reserve the status of authorship for those who deserve credit and can take responsibility for the work. The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify colleagues from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criterion #s 2 or 3.

Note that there is an AND operator tying the four criteria, but there are some ORs within the individual entries. Thus, in essence, to be adherent with the Vancouver recommendations for authorship, one has to meet all four requirements, while in meeting each of the four, one is allowed to meet them minimally.

To take one example:

If you substantially contributed to 1) data analysis, and to 2) revising the paper draft, and then you subsequently 3) approved of the final version and 4) agreed to be held accountable for all the work, then congrats! you have met the authorship criteria!

One could take others routes through the four criteria, some arguably easier, while some even harder.

In my own view, we as a field should hope for the Vancouver recommendations to have already been adopted in NLP research, if only implicitly through the way our research groups and collaborations work.

Yet, are they? What are your thoughts? In your view, are the Vancouver recommendations well-matched with the COLING 2018 paper types? In general, are there aspects of your work in NLP that are left uncovered by the authorship criteria? Might there be at least some controversy and discussion potential to this matchup? 🙂

As the deadline for submission draws near, we’d like to alert our authors to a few things that are a bit different from previous COLINGs and other computational linguistics/NLP venues in the hopes that this will help the submission process go smoothly.

Paper types

Please consider the paper type you indicate carefully, as this will affect what the reviewers are instructed to look for you in your paper.  We encourage you to read the description of the paper types and especially the associated reviewer questions carefully. Which set of questions would you most like to have asked of your paper? (And if reading the questions inspires you to reframe/edit a bit to better address them before submitting, that is absolutely fair game!)

Emiel van Miltenburg raised the point on Twitter last week that it can be difficult to categorize papers and in particular that certain papers might fall between our paper types, combining characteristics of more than one, or being something else entirely.

We had a very nice discussion at @CLTLVU today about papers we’re planning to submit to @coling2018.

Everybody agreed that the paper types are very useful, but it’s sometimes difficult to categorize #nlproc papers.

— Emiel van Miltenburg (@evanmiltenburg) March 7, 2018

Emiel and colleagues wondered whether we could implement a “tagging” system where authors could indicate the range of paper types their paper relates to. That is an intriguing idea, but it doesn’t work with the way we are using paper types to improve the diversity and rage of papers at COLING. As noted above, the paper types entail different questions on the review forms. We’re doing that because otherwise it seems that everything gets evaluated against the NLP Engineering Experiment paper type, which in turn means it’s hard to get papers of the other types accepted.  And as we hope we’ve made it blindingly clear, we really are interested in getting a broad range of paper types!

Keywords

The other aspect of our submission form that will have a strong impact on how your paper is reviewed is the keywords. Following the system pioneered by Ani Nenkova and Owen Rambow as PC co-chairs for NAACL 2016, we have asked our reviewers to all describe their areas of expertise along five dimensions:

1. Linguistic targets of study
2. Application tasks
3. Approaches
4. Languages
5. Genres

(All five of these have a none of the above/not-applicable option.) The reviewers (and area chairs) all indicated all of the items on each of these dimensions they have the expertise and interest to review for. For authors, we ask you to indicate which items on each dimension best describe the paper you are submitting. Softconf will then match your paper to an area based on the assignment of papers to areas that best optimizes reviewer expertise for the papers submitted.

In sum: To ensure the most informed reviewing possible of your paper, please fill out these keywords carefully.  We urge you to start your submission in the system ahead of time so you aren’t trying to complete this task in a hurry just at the deadline.

Dual submission policy

Our Call for Papers indicates the following dual submission policy:

Papers that have been or will be under consideration for other venues at the same time must indicate this at submission time. If a paper is accepted for publication at COLING, it must be immediately withdrawn from other venues. If a paper under review at COLING is accepted elsewhere and authors intend to proceed there, the COLING committee must be notified immediately.

We have added a field in the submission form for you to be able to indicate this information.

LRE Map

COLING 2018 is participating in LRE map, as described in this guest post by Nicoletta Calzolari. In the submission form, you are asked to provide information about language resources your research has used—and those it has produced. Do not worry about anonymity on this form.  This information is not shared with reviewers.

We ask the reviewers for COLING 2018 to adhere to the following code of conduct. (This has also been sent to the reviewers via email, but for transparency’s sake we post it here as well.)

Reviewer Code of Conduct

As our field experiences an upswing in participation, we have more submissions to our conferences, and this means we have to be careful to keep the reviewing process as efficient as possible. One tool used by editors and chairs is the “desk reject”. This is a way to filter out papers that clearly shouldn’t get through for whatever reason, without asking area chairs and reviewers to handle them, leaving our volunteers to use their energy on the important process of dealing with your serious work.

A desk reject is an automatic rejection without further review. This saves time, but is also quite a strong reaction to a submission. For that reason, this post clarifies possible reasons for a desk reject and the stages at which this might occur. It is the responsibility of the authors to make sure to avoid these situations.

Reasons for desk rejects:

• Page length violations. The content limit at COLING is 9 pages. (You may include as many pages as needed for references.) Appendices, if part of the main paper, must be put into that nine pages. It’s unfair to judge longer papers against those that have kept to the limit and so exceeding the page limit means a desk reject.
• Template cheating. The LaTeX and Word templates give a level playing field for everyone. Squeezing out whitespace, adjusting margins, and changing the font size all stop that playing field from being even and give an unfair advantage. If you’re not using the official template, you’ve altered that template, or the way a manuscript uses it goes beyond our intent, then the paper may be desk rejected.
• Missing or poor anonymisation. It’s well-established that non-anonymised papers from “big name” authors and institutions fare better during review. To avoid this effect, and others, COLING is running double-blind; see our post on the nuances of double-blinding. We do not endeavour to be arbiters of what does or does not constitute a “big name”—rather, any paper that is poorly anonymised (or not anonymised at all) will face desk reject. See below for a few more comments on anonymisation.
• Inappropriate content. We want to give our reviewers and chairs research papers to review. Content that really does not fit this will be desk rejected.
• Plagiarism. Submitting work that has already appeared, has already been accepted for publication at another venue, or has any significant overlap with other works submitted to COLING will be desk rejected. Several major NLP conferences are actively collaborating on this.
• Breaking the arXiv embargo. COLING follows the ACL pre-print policy. This means that only papers not published on pre-print services or published on pre-print services more than a month before the deadline (i.e. before February 16, 2018) will be considered. Pre-prints published after this date (non-anonymously) may not be submitted for review at COLING. In conjunction with other NLP conferences this year, we’ll be looking for instances of this and desk rejecting them.

The desk rejects are determined at four separate points. In order,

1. Automatic rejection by the START submission system, which has a few checks at various levels.
2. A rejection by the PC co-chairs, before papers are allocated to areas.
3. After papers are placed in areas, ACs have the opportunity to check for problems. One response is to desk reject.
4. Finally, during and immediately after allocation of papers to reviewers, an individual reviewer may send a message to invoke desk rejection, which will be queried and checked by at least two people from the ACs or PC co-chairs.

As an honest researcher trying to publish your important and exciting work, the above probably do not apply to you. But if they do, please think twice. We would prefer to send out no desk rejects and imagine it would be much more pleasant for our authors if none were to receive a desk reject. So, now you know what to avoid!

Postscript on anonymisation

Papers must be anonymised. This protects everybody during review. It’s a complex issue to implement, which is why we earlier had a post dedicated to double blindness in peer review. There are strict anonymisation guidelines in the call for papers and the only way to be sure that nobody takes exception during the review process is to follow these guidelines.

We’ve received several questions on what the best practices for anonymisation are.  We realize that in long-standing projects, it can be impossible to truly disguise the group that work comes from.  Nonetheless, we expect all COLING authors to follow the forms of anonymisation:

1. Do NOT include author names/affiliations in the version of the paper submitted for review.  Instead, the author block should say “Anonymous”.
2. When making reference to your own published work, cite it as if written by someone else: “Following Lee (2007), …” “Using the evaluation metric proposed by Garcia (2016), …”
3. The only time it’s okay to use “anonymous” in a citation is when you are referring to your own unpublished work: “The details of the construction of the data are described in our companion paper (anonymous, under review).”
4. Expanded versions of earlier workshop papers should rework the prose sufficiently so as not to turn up as potential plagiarism examples. The final published version of such papers should acknowledge the earlier workshop paper, but that should be suppressed in the version submitted for review.
5. More generally, the acknowledgments section should be left out of the version submitted for review.
6. Papers making code available for reproducibility or resources available for community use should host a version of that at a URL that doesn’t reveal the authors’ identity or  institution.

We have been asked a few times about whether LRE Map entries can be done without de-anonymising submissions.  The LRE Map data will not be shared with reviewers, so this is not a concern.

Keeping resources anonymised is a little harder. We recommend you keep things like names of people and labs out of your code and files; for example, Java code uploaded that ran within an edu.uchicago.nlp namespace would be problematic. Similarly, if the URL given is within a personal namespace, this breaks double-blindness, and must be avoided. Google Drive, Dropbox and Amazon S3 – as well as many other file-sharing services – offer reasonably anonymous (and often free) file sharing URLs, and we recommend you use those if you can’t upload your data/code/resources into START as supplementary materials.