Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference
Yang Gao, Steffen Eger, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
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.- Anthology ID:
- N19-1129
- Original:
- N19-1129v1
- Version 2:
- N19-1129v2
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1274–1290
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N19-1129
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N19-1129
- Cite (ACL):
- Yang Gao, Steffen Eger, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych, and Yusuke Miyao. 2019. Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1274–1290, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference (Gao et al., NAACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/N19-1129.pdf
- Code
- UKPLab/naacl2019-does-my-rebuttal-matter