This repository contains selected code and data for our NAACL 2019 long paper on Does my Rebuttal Matter?.
After the publication of the original paper some members of the ACL community have expressed concerns about the technicalities of the consent collection procedure used during the ACL-2018 reviewing campaign. We take such concerns seriously, and due to ethical and privacy-related reasons can not make the textual reviewing data from ACL-2018 openly available. We have designed better data collection workflows since then, and you might have been involved in some of our later and current initiatives.
We are working on technical solutions to make the textual data from ACL-2018 accessible in some form. In the meantime, due to the large number of requests, we release a completely anonymous ACL-2018 Numerical Dataset: it doesn't contain the sensitive textual data, but provides rich metadata incl. aspect scores, contribution evaluation and formal checks, as well as track and acceptance information. We hope that this data will serve as basis for non-NLP models of peer reviewing, and as a rich auxiliary signal for future NLP approaches.
You can access the data via our University archive: https://tudatalib.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/handle/tudatalib/2639?locale-attribute=en_US. If you use it, please use the original "Does my Rebuttal Matter" paper as reference.
@inproceedings{Gao:2019:NAACL,
title = {Does my Rebuttal Matter? Insights From a Major NLP conference},
year = {2019},
author = {Yang Gao and Steffen Eger and Ilia Kuznetsov and Iryna Gurevych and Yusuke Miyao},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
month = {Februar},
journal = {NAACL 2019},
url = {http://tubiblio.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/111643/}
}
Abstract: Peer review is a core element of the scientific process, particularly in conference-centered fields such as ML and NLP. However, only few studies have evaluated its properties empirically. Aiming to fill this gap, we present a corpus that contains over 4k reviews and 1.2k author responses from ACL-2018. We quantitatively and qualitatively assess the corpus. This includes a pilot study on paper weaknesses given by reviewers and on quality of author responses. We then focus on the role of the rebuttal phase, and propose a novel task to predict after-rebuttal (i.e., final) scores from initial reviews and author responses. Although author responses do have a marginal (and statistically significant) influence on the final scores, especially for borderline papers, our results suggest that a reviewer’s final score is largely determined by her initial score and the distance to the other reviewers’ initial scores. In this context, we discuss the conformity bias inherent to peer reviewing, a bias that has largely been overlooked in previous research. We hope our analyses will help better assess the usefulness of the rebuttal phase in NLP conferences
Contact person: Yang Gao gao@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de, Steffen Eger eger@aiphes.tu-darmstadt.de, Ilia Kuznetsov
https://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/
Don't hesitate to send us an e-mail or report an issue, if something is broken (and it shouldn't be) or if you have further questions.
This project includes three major parts:
- the ACL-2018 Review dataset,
- our quanlitative analyses on the dataset, and
- our code for predicting whether the reviewer will increase/decrease/remain her overall score after rebuttal.
According to the data sharing terms and conditions of ACL-2018, the opted-in reviews will be publically available no earlier than two years after the conference took place. We will publish the dataset in this project once it is allowed.
- Python 3 (tested with Python 3.6 on Ubuntu 16.04)
- libraries in requirement.txt: pip install -r requirement.txt (the use of virtual environment is recommended)
- Discussion&Response: includes the csv files of the opted-in reviews, submissions information (e.g. paper ids and acceptance/rejection decisions) and author responses. Will be published once allowed.
- RebuttalAnalysis: code used to build the after-rebuttal score predictor. 'classify_after_label.py' includes the main function for the predictor. 'predict_after_score.py' builds a regression to predict the after-rebuttal score for each reviewer (its results are not reported in the orginal paper).
We provide word2vec word embeddings trained on Machine Learning (cs.LG) and NLP (cs.CL) Arxiv papers. The embeddings are available from https://public.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/naacl2019-does-my-rebuttal-matter
To run a LLR test to determine the most "unusual" words in one corpus relative to another, run
python3 getMostFrequent.py accepted.txt rejected.txt 100 2
This returns the 100 most unusual bigrams of accepted.txt relative to rejected.txt. The two input files are plain text files with words separated by white space. Each document in accepted.txt and rejected.txt should end with a newline of "<--EOD-->".