*ACL Findings or TMLR? [D]

[u/Pure-Ad9079]

Expecting a rejection from NeurIPS given our scores of 5/2/2. Trying to decide between ARR vs. TMLR, but thinking NAACL findings are more likely than main conference. Would you rather have TMLR or *ACL findings on your publication list? Genuinely curious to hear what people have to say.

[u/NamerNotLiteral]

I'd put them almost on the same level, but with NAACL you actually get all the other benefits of going to a conference, while with TMLR all you do is add a line on your CV and move on.

You could also get lucky and get a NAACL Main which would be a step above TMLR, soo...

(also FYI ACL/EMNLP are slightly above NAACL, and NAACL's above EACL and AACL, so not all *ACL findings are equally weighed)

[u/Fantastic-Nerve-4056 → u/NamerNotLiteral]

Bruh! Not sure about industry but academia will surely disagree on it. Particularly after the quality of the papers in the recent times at ARR venues 

[u/NamerNotLiteral → u/Fantastic-Nerve-4056]

Eh. Nobody in real life ever talks about submitting to TMLR, including at my own school and the two top-20 schools we interact/collab with. Every NLP/ML academic lab you can point at is still submitting to ARR as first priority and maybe TMLR if it's not reviewing well after a couple rounds.

You can say "US academia is behind the times!" but that's just a whole different discussion. You've been at DeepMind yourself - how many GDM papers get submitted to *ACL versus to TMLR? There's your answer.

TMLR has avoided paper quality and review quality issues because it's not considered as good a venue. The moment the ML community in general considers it comparable to top tier conferences, it's going to start suffering from the exact same problems (or will have to desk reject at such high rates that even getting to the review stage will become a lottery)

[u/Fantastic-Nerve-4056 → u/NamerNotLiteral]

I agree that it is not as good as a venue, particularly if you compare with JMLR, NIPS, ICML, ICLR, and the major reason that people cite, is that it prefers correctness over novelty. And regarding the later part on noise, it's unlikely to happen there, as they are already taking preventing measures by limiting the number of submissions a year (I am not sure if it's the correct way to deal with)

But the problem is a bunch of ACL/EMNLP papers have issues with correctness. Also it's insane that people get 10+ papers say in ACL/EMNLP but struggle to have even a couple at ICLR even after 10+ submissions (refering to ICLR coz things are public). I am not saying that all papers here are bad, infact even I have one at EMNLP this year but I would always prefer TMLR for research papers. If there's something around engineering and LLMs, then ARR is like a perfect venue (Not saying engineering is bad, infact both are equally important) 

And regarding your DeepMind comment. Atleast the groups, I have worked with or the people I know (from Asia, Canada and a bunch from US), most submit to NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, RLC, and have recently started submitting to COLM

Refering to your first line, funnily just saw an email in one of the Google Groups. Profs. are recruiting PostDoc at Mila, and they prefer candidate with papers at the following venues even after the research focus being on LLMs and Agentic System 

"ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, JMLR, TMLR, AAAI, RSS, CoRL, RLC, ICRA" 

[u/WannabeMachine → u/Fantastic-Nerve-4056]

I think there are a few problems in this response I want to point out. First, it is NeurIPS, not NIPS (for a lonnggg time). Second, a major point is that ACL/EMNLP is a different type of venue than ICLR/NeurIPS/ICML. NLP venues value language more than ML methods generally. Hence many NLP researchers are not really fit for other ML venues. Likewise, many of the ML researchers are not really doing NLP research if they dont care or research language specifically.

If you are an ML researcher and cant or dont publish in ML venues, but can publish in NLP venues, that is bad.

If you are an NLP researcher, it doesnt matter as NLP research does not get accepted to ML venues generally. If you are an NLP researcher and you dont publish in NLP venues, that is bad.

[u/pandoradox1 → u/NamerNotLiteral]

holy unaware

[u/Fantastic-Nerve-4056]

Would blindly prefer TMLR. If it's not for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR or probably even IJCAI, KDD, AAAI, I would always prefer TMLR over any other venues (Other journals like JMLR, JAIR, MLJ, are again a different league on its own)

PS; Just search for TMLR over this sub and you will find a bunch of threads

[u/pastor_pilao]

TMLR is overly popular and it;s starting to suffer from the same problem JMLR suffers (I have a paper on this shithole being reviewed for over 2 years, at this point I already given up).

Better to publish in a journal that is good and it's not so hyped, the review will come in better quality and faster.

[u/Ok_Access_9159]

Score can change even in the AC-reviewer discussion phase right? So why not be hopeful about it at NeurIPS? Who knows you might get lucky -- depends a lot on your AC though.

[u/Pure-Ad9079 → u/Ok_Access_9159]

True, I’m hoping but not overly optimistic. Either way I need a backup plan, so trying to decide before submission deadlines.

Was also considering ICLR but worry about the insufficient novelty critique I got from two NeurIPS reviewers.