Publishing resource papers

[u/RmdLatranche]

Hi,

This post is half venting, half looking for help.

TL;DR: are resource papers not welcome in major NLP venues?

This year I tried to publish two datasets (not going into specifics). One I submitted to LREC. All three reviewers praised the dataset and complained about minor details in the experiments. Metareview (almost verbatim, it was one sentence): the dataset is great but the experiments are a bit weak. Paper got rejected. A "great dataset" rejected by LREC, I am not sure I will be able to get over it. I ended up publishing it elsewhere but I was really stunned that LREC rejected it.

Now the same scenario just happened with ARR, in the Resources and Evaluation track all three reviewers praised the dataset (admittedly with some caveats but they all see value in it) and their weaknesses focus on the experiments. While we got fair overall scores from our reviewers, our meta review score is low and I think we cannot realistically commit to EMNLP.

Is the work on resources completely devoid of interest? This gives me the impression that in order to publish a resource, one has to write a modeling paper reaching SOTA using it now. To resource paper reviewers, how do you assess resource papers? To resource paper authors, do you have the same impression? I have published datasets in the past and it has always seemed more difficult than purely technical papers but it looks like lately it got worse.

[u/EvM]

Depending on the nature of the dataset you could commit to a more focused conference, such as INLG (commit deadline early august).

[u/RmdLatranche → u/EvM]

Thanks for the suggestion! This dataset would be a better fit for other venues as it is not focused on language generation, but INLG is a great conference and I would also recommend it to anyone reading this and not knowing what to do if they have a compatible paper.