Been working on a conference paper.
You know what the worst thing is about doing a paper? No, not getting it rejected. Okay, the second worst thing. Not being able to find any research similar to yours.
Actually, it could be a great thing. You could be the genius who has figured out something new that no one’s ever thought of. On the other hand, you could be doing something worthless that no one else wants to do. Or — more terrifyingly — you’re just a sucky researcher who can’t do a literature review, and it’s already been done, and everyone knows it. Except you, you lazy person. Frightening, isn’t it?
So when I get a good result, I always feel elated, but I brace myself. Writing this paper has been a bit like that.
But it’s in the can now. I’ve sent it off to EMNLP, a Very Big and Important Conference. And if you want to see the results of the study, I’ve made a presentation that you can view. You can read a PDF, or you can have a cute Flash animation, if you’d rather.
8 July 2008 at 9:27 pm
Thanks for posting the pdf. I was one of your participants and I found it a very interesting exercise. Were you surprised by the results? Given the poor level of grammar of most of my students I would anticipate that the public would be fairly poor. However, I guess the fact that it’s presented as speech means that people relate to it differently – perhaps there’s some way what you’re doing could be used to help students gain confidence in grammar?!
Hope the paper goes down well at the conference. I like the graphics.
10 July 2008 at 1:41 pm
Thanks for the input, snoke.
I actually had no idea what to expect, except that I was hoping to get some idea of peoples perceptions in segmenting.
The result I got from overlaying the votes was a total surprise, though in retrospect I suppose it shouldn’t have been. Naturally a group is going to be smarter than its smartest member — I learned that from running quiz nights. But I had no idea that everyone was going to agree with me so closely. Those agreement rates are quite rare in dialogue annotation. Maybe this will start a new trend.
As a linguist, I’ve found that people are good at some things, and not naturally good at others.
People are good at:
– Telling if a sentence is good or bad
– Figuring out what people are trying to do by saying something
People are not naturally good at:
– Telling why a sentence is good or bad
– Examining their language use
This task was one that people do well.
I used Keynote (by Apple) for the graphics and all. I highly recommend iWork over MS Office. Love it.