Michael michaelsaxon

I am always happy to provide referrals for folks applying to Amazon for a variety of roles. Amazon is a FAANG, so I know that landing a job there can make a big difference to someone's career, and I am happy to spend the time to provide a referral.

If you are interested, please read the points below very carefully before reaching out (I only accept requests via LinkedIn). This is to save time on both sides 😄 I will not entertain requests from those who have clearly not read these points, regarless of how great your accomplishments are. No exceptions.

I usually check my personal email around 9am EST / 8pm IST. If you reach out, please give me upto 48 hours to revert.

The tips:

It is up to you to visit amazon.jobs and search for open positions.

ACL is not an AI Conference (?)

Yoav Goldberg, August 2024

In her "Presidential Address" at the ACL 2024, Emily Bender gave a talk called "ACL is not an AI Conference". For those who did not attend (or were not paying close attention), you can find the slides in the following link: https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/ACL_2024_Presidential_Address.pdf

Somewhat surprisingly, I found myself agreeing with some core aspects of her argument. Perhaps less surprisingly, there is also a substantial part which I strongly disagree with. This text is a response to this address, and, beyond just responding, may also shed some light on what is ACL, and what is NLP. I of course welcome discussion on these topics, either on the comments section here (unfortunately not very convenient) or on Twitter (not convenient in a different way). Ok, Let's go.

ACL is not a Computational Linguistics Conference

The Impossible Task of Conference SACs/PCs or How I lost 3 Nights of Sleep

I am writing this post in order to share my thoughts on the processes behind acceptance/rejection decisions in top-tier (NLP) conferences. I'll first discuss the process and then share some thoughts on its shortcomings.

Before we start, a bit about me. I am an assistant professor (aka, rather junior: I have been in this position for less than 4 years, following my PhD studies and a short postdoc) working on NLP, with a focus on multilingualism and low-resource settings. While I have submitted, published at, and reviewed for *ACL conferences and workshops for many years, it was at EMNLP'23 that I was a Senior Area Chair (SAC) for the first time.

The Conference Paper Pipeline

Let's first briefly outline the process that a paper undergoes, from submission to decision:

	library(tidyverse)



	# Prepare data with Praat and Matt Winn's functions
	# https://github.com/ListenLab/Praat/blob/master/praat_spectrogram_functions.R

	# file <- "my-file.Spectrogram"
	#
	# df_spectrogram <- file %>%