Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

. Saturday, May 24, 2008
1 comments

Johannes Fuernkranz sent this announcement to the ML-news list. I think it is a great new to the NLP and ML communities as some negative results can be even more useful than some positive results. This is a good way to prevent others to do not expend time exploring hypothesis that have been invalidated by others.

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Journal of Intersting Negative Results
http://www.jinr.org
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We are happy to announce the on-line publication of the first article in the Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Please visit http://www.jinr.org and click on "articles".

JINR is an electronic journal, with a printed version to be negotiated with a major publisher once we have established a steady presence. The journal will bring to the fore research in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning that uncovers interesting negative results.

It is becoming more and more obvious that the research community in general, and those who work NLP and ML in particular, are biased towards publishing successful ideas and experiments. Insofar as both our research areas focus on theories "proven" via empirical methods, we are sure to encounter ideas that fail at the experimental stage for unexpected, and often interesting, reasons. Much can be learned by analysing why some ideas, while intuitive and plausible, do not work. The importance of counter-examples for disproving conjectures is already well known. Negative results may point to interesting and important open problems. Knowing directions that lead to dead-ends in research can help others avoid replicating paths that take them nowhere. This might accelerate progress or even break through walls!

We propose this journal as a resource that gives a voice to negative results which stem from intuitive and justifiable ideas, proven wrong through thorough and well-conducted experiments. We also encourage the submission of short papers/communications presenting counter-examples to usually accepted conjectures or to published papers.

The journal's scope encompasses all areas of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Papers published in JINR will meet the highest quality standards, as measured by the originality and significance of the contribution. They will describe research with theoretical and practical significance. All theories and ideas will have to be clearly stated and justified by a deep literature review.

Conferences to Come

. Friday, May 23, 2008
2 comments

There are some nice machine learning /data mining related conferences to come in the next weeks/months. ICML (co-located with COLT and UAI) and ECML have closed their main track deadlines, but there still exists the possibility to send a paper to some ECML workshops (I'll try to attend the workshop "New Challenges for Feature Selection in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery"). The next deadlines:
There are also other more general conferences that could be interesting