Best Paper Awards at ACL 2020

What an interesting collection, thanks!

It's kind of surprising to me that Microsoft Research is the all-time leader, gathering more best paper awards than any top university. Wow. This in itself tells a story about Microsoft Research.

Do you happen to have a time series on this? Would be interesting to see the trends in your data, e.g. to check how industrial research fares vs. academic research as a function of time. (There are some theories suggesting that industrial research is in a general decline [0]. Though the "best paper awards" metric is surely far from being perfect, it might still be viable as a proxy for corporate research performance.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672

I liked that article also.

I went to NACL about 5 years ago, and was amazed that most papers even then were deep learning related.

BTW, it is a small nuisance to not have article links on this web page. I had to copy titles/authors, do a web search, find and download. That said, between just skimming vs. careful reading, I probably spend an average of 20 minutes on a downloaded article so the overhead of finding and downloading is realy nothing.

every couple decades, there is a new approach that promises to do solve more of the language understanding problems with less of humans actually thinking about and understanding the inner workings of language. Each time we get a phenomenon which is best described with the hype cycle analogy, namely consistent progress of what it can do, along with even faster progress of what people expect from the technique, until the actual progress cannot keep up with expectations and we settle at a new (much progressed but much disillusioned) level.

BERT, GPT-2 and now GPT-3 have brought us to the tail end of such a hype cycle, with the most enthusiastic DNN enthusiasts still claiming that it's understanding meaning and general AI isn't far off, whereas the folks who give out ACL Best Paper awards (all long-time experts in their field) probably sigh and are thankful for a paper that breaks with the hype and tells the overenthusiasts that there's still stuff left to understand and discover.

Do we need mediocre philosophical papers when we can have mediocre technical papers (or even fairly decent technical papers) instead? Hell no. But do we occasionally need a good and thoughtful philosophical paper to sober ourselves up? Admittedly yes.

Great title and a great problem to work on.