Reflections on my Last Conference and Academic Journey
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With the conclusion of #ACL2024 some reflections on the last conference of my PhD and the academic journey over the past four years.
🤝 Conference
The food at the conference was absolutely amazing! On the academic side, things got spicy beyond just the cuisine. There was a heated exchange after the second keynote on the reasoning and planning abilities of LLMs which added some unexpected drama to the mix.
Attending conferences during my PhD was a highlight, especially since, as the only NLP researcher at the University of Bern, it was fantastic to connect with so many like-minded people.
I am honored that the acting ACL president, Emily Bender, attended my oral presentation and actively engaged in the discussion. Her concerns about synthetic data use in the legal domain, though not directly applicable to our work, added an interesting dimension to the conversation. The exchange, while intense, was valuable to clarify our methods and contribute to robust academic discourse.
Afterward, I had a great chat with Luca Soldaini about their paper OLMo. It’s fantastic to see this huge open science effort rewarded with a best paper award!
🧑⚖️ Reviews
Throughout my academic journey, peer review has been challenging and frustrating. Common issues included reviewers focusing solely on self-disclosed limitations, undervaluing dataset contributions, and requesting impractical experiments outside the research scope.
It was particularly disheartening to receive inconsistent review scores and rejection decisions that completely disregarded our thorough rebuttals and additional experiments.
I believe many have had similar experiences, which is why the positive feedback from reviewers on my last paper was so refreshing. One reviewer’s comment, “This is how a dataset paper should be written,” made my day. The stellar meta-review score and the consideration for the best paper award were the cherry on top. This experience was a much-needed reminder of the rewarding aspects of academia, despite the often arduous process.
🧑🔬 PhD Journey
When students ask if pursuing a PhD is worth it, I reflect on my own experience. The journey was challenging, filled with long hours, late nights, and weekends working. Maintaining good mental health was tough, and the review process was incredibly frustrating.
However, the rewards were significant. Earning a PhD opened many doors for me, granting access to opportunities that I might not have had otherwise. It allows me to work on topics that I find genuinely fascinating, travel to conferences, and enjoy the freedom to choose when and where I work. While the path is demanding, the benefits can be substantial, particularly if you are passionate about your field.
⚖️ Legal NLP
It was really nice talking to many researchers at the poster session. I think this may be a reflection of the surge in interest in applications to the legal domain over the last years.
It is a very exciting time for legal NLP now, exemplified by so many legal AI startups being founded. When I started, we were still very limited by the methods available to us. For example, generative capabilities were very limited with models often still making grammar mistakes. Additionally, the context width was often limited to 512 tokens, making many applications in the legal domain, such as document drafting and summarization, infeasible. Finally, while models are still much worse multilingually compared to English, the situation is improving a lot. I am looking forward to seeing researchers tackle more and more difficult and real world legal tasks.
Now I am very much looking forward to my next chapter in industry, more about this another time.
Thanks to all my amazing mentors and collaborators along the way, especially Veton Matoshi, Ilias Chalkidis, Matthias Stürmer, Daniel E. Ho, and Garrett Honke.