Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference

Yang Gao, Steffen Eger, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao


Abstract
Peer review is a core element of the scientific process, particularly in conference-centered fields such as ML and NLP. However, only few studies have evaluated its properties empirically. Aiming to fill this gap, we present a corpus that contains over 4k reviews and 1.2k author responses from ACL-2018. We quantitatively and qualitatively assess the corpus. This includes a pilot study on paper weaknesses given by reviewers and on quality of author responses. We then focus on the role of the rebuttal phase, and propose a novel task to predict after-rebuttal (i.e., final) scores from initial reviews and author responses. Although author responses do have a marginal (and statistically significant) influence on the final scores, especially for borderline papers, our results suggest that a reviewer’s final score is largely determined by her initial score and the distance to the other reviewers’ initial scores. In this context, we discuss the conformity bias inherent to peer reviewing, a bias that has largely been overlooked in previous research. We hope our analyses will help better assess the usefulness of the rebuttal phase in NLP conferences.
Anthology ID:
N19-1129
Original:
N19-1129v1
Version 2:
N19-1129v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1274–1290
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1129
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1129
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Gao, Steffen Eger, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych, and Yusuke Miyao. 2019. Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1274–1290, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference (Gao et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1129.pdf
Code
 UKPLab/naacl2019-does-my-rebuttal-matter