@nlpnoah: NLP research and practice ask fundamentally different questions
/1
@nlpnoah: NLP practice asks whether X improves the outcome. NLP research tries to fill in the gaps in the knowledge map.
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@nlpnoah: Leaderboards are the dominant frame for presenting research findings. That frame by its very nature puts the winner at the top, and un-focuses all of this:
/3
@nlpnoah: let's admit to ourselves that "sota" is a verb. and it should be lowercased.
/4
@nlpnoah: depressingly many parallels between leaderboard-driven research and competitive sports
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@nlpnoah The very notion of "negative results" presupposes that very same sports-like frame! Useful as the leaderboards are, they are not the only thing we need.
(with follow-up comment from Margot Mieskes: the Insights workshop should be renamed!)
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@nlpnoah: here's some alternative frames that might be useful in NLP research.
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@nlpnoah: a bonus from focusing on gaining knowledge and not on sota-ing is improved mental health. If you're trying to answer a question, whatever answer you get is a result.
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Question: in an exploding field the simple leaderboard frame is partly a coping mechanism for the authors to try to reach a broader audience. @nlpnoah: NLP community is not all that homogeneous. Let's be brave, non-mainstream papers may find a wider audience than we think.
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Question: one reason for leaderboards is to enable people to easily compare with prior work. How about we just publish multiple metrics, for maximal reach to future work? @nlpnoah: Might work. We could also release raw system outputs.
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Dear tech & ethics people: I've done some research on Roskomnadzor: the "ministry of truth" that created the alternative propaganda reality most Russians seem to inhabit. Some truly fascinating stuff. Here's what I learned 🧵
As always, comments/corrections welcome. /1
The most obvious thing Roskomnadzor does is direct censoriship. E.g. if a blog publshes a story Putin doesn't like, Roskomnadzor requires its removal. A popular reason is "extremism", which applied to e.g. Navalny investigations of corrupt officials. /2 osce.usmission.gov/on-media-freed…
One more mechanism they use is declaring media organizations (or even individual creators) as "foreign agents". These have to be registered in a very labor-intensive way, do lots of reporting on their finances - or pay huge fines. /3
🇺🇦 update: Kyiv and the big cities are also still controlled by Ukraine. Russians did take Berdyansk, but they do NOT control the Zaporizhzha nuclear power plant, as they claimed this morning. /1
Judging by the amount of threads by strategy/military experts, we now have two big questions: (a) why on earth is Putin doing this, (b) why are they failing so badly. /2
This is going to be a big day for the economists: nobody has ever frozen the assets of the central bank before, and seems like it's hard to tell what exactly will happen. /3
His stated motivation in this vid is not that 🇺🇦 kicks his army's ass, but that the West takes "unfriendly" steps (sanctions), and there are "aggressive statements" from the top officials. Who exactly is he threatening? /1
In case you missed it: Russians already increased radiation level bc they stirred radioactive soil while rolling tanks through Chernobyl. They also hit a nuclear facility in Kyiv (thank god no leaks). And 2 energy facilities exploded (oil & gas). /2
So this is already an environmental disaster for 🇺🇦, and that's before we talk about the global danger of even having all those weapons by the Chernobyl reactor - handled by the army that seems to struggle to draw "z" at first attempt. /3
Your daily reminder: what the West now does for Ukraine is important not just for 🇺🇦 Ukraine, but as a precedent. Very few other conflicts have received equal attention from the West in the past, and that's horrible. /1
As a matter of fact, not even Ukraine itself has ever received this much attention, even though the exact same war has been going on since 2014. Thousands died, millions were displaced in the heart of Europe, the Ukrainians were as white and as competent - and nobody cared. /2
I am hoping someone in political science is writing an analysis of this involuntary A|B test on Ukraine. My best theory is that we only got this much atttention now because Putin went mad and clearly threatened the more powerful countries. /3
🇺🇦 update: lots of great news this morning!
* Kyiv is stil standing. As a matter of fact, the mighty Russian army still isn't holding ANY large city in Ukraine, which is getting embarassing.
/1
* US starts a dedicated task force to hunt oligarch money and stop "golden passports"!!!!! /2
🇺🇦status update: Russia gets cut off from SWIFT! It's only for "some" banks🤔, but I'm very happy to see that EU is capable of moving fast, in principle. Also Germany is finally supplying Ukraine with weapons (and many other countries do that too) /1
The bad news is that there will be more heavy fighting for Kyiv this night. If Russians don't take it, it'll start to just look really bad for them professionally. So they'll probably go all in. They already hit an oil terminal in Vasylkiv😢/2
More bad news is that the Russian army is either incompetent or war-criminal enough to have already targeted the hydro dam, which could flood the area with *millions* of people. I'm not religious, but I'm praying for Kyiv today 🙏🕯 /3