The Journey of an A* Paper

I’m supposed to be writing my thesis or synopsis or preparing camera-ready version of a paper. Yet I feel awash with emotions, primarily that of over-whelming relief, to get started with any of these tasks.

The reason is that our paper got accepted in a top-tier A* conference (AAAI). This was a milestone unimaginable for me nearly two years ago. I contemplated writing a Facebook post thanking all my friends and mentors. But I felt the ocean of words that’s gushing at my fingertips would defy any reasonable standard of reading comfort on a social media platform and decided to make a blog post out of it.

My story begins nearly two years ago, on 15 February 2018. My mental health was at its lowest point and I was waiting with pursed lips to present our PhD progress work for the previous five years. Me and my professional Siamese twin Savitha, having had the unique opportunity to contribute extraordinarily to each other’s works, described our progress and waited for our committee’s verdict. The meeting went surprisingly decent considering we hadn’t achieved our mandatory goal of journal publication yet. It was but the calm before the storm before our world got tossed topsy turvy. We had exhausting meetings spanning three months where I fought just to get a chance to complete what I ventured to do, to complete my PhD.

In this period of three months, I had contemplated quitting cold turkey, quitting with a masters degree, taking up a job (I attended an interview and took up a mediocre job which I quit in a week), attempting UPSC prelims and taking Bharatanatyam seriously. Coupled with personal losses and setbacks that just decided to happen the same time this taxing exercise was happening, I woke up every alternate day screaming and with panic attacks. I turned up in the department only to attend meetings and nothing else. Savitha would come home often to check up on me and discuss the required work. What I would have done without my friends? Chethana, Apoorva, Geethu and Shree would talk as much as they could, what with me being as distraught as I was.

After these three months, we were assigned a new advisor, Deepak, under the administrative guidance of our then Head of the Department. The only catch was he was a lecturer in the U.K. Now we had an advisor who lived in a different timezone and was working in a different area. We had heard of deep learning as this magical realm where data scientist fairies lived, not people like us. How on Earth were we going to shift gears and work? I heard hushed comments like “how will she complete with a guide so far away when she couldn’t do anything till now?”. I also heard comments which suggested I over-stepped myself in these meetings and spoke beyond what I should have. Sometimes when I look back at that time, I feel I acted at a subconscious level; I could not function any better.

The first turning point was how incredibly kind and supportive my new advisor was. The first culture shock for me, hailing from a traditional hierarchical education system, was his encouragement, nay his insistence, we call him by his name. He completely understood our situation and guided us with a lot of hand-holding into the murky lands of statistical research.

We hoped to get a government scholarship to collaborate with him in the UK. Unfortunately, we did not get that. Then, we turned to the first order of business, which was to get a journal paper. We worked on a project and prepared for a special track in a journal that seemed to be tailor-made for our chosen domain. I learned a lot about how to go about academic writing by observing how he wrote. By this time, I had started going to the department every day. The upliftment of my mood was helped by the progress in my work, dance and my friends’ support.

Then, on my birthday 27th September 2018, I randomly asked an acquaintance of mine, Purnata, to take a photo of me with her DSLR and within three days, she became my best friend. Having been in similar situations and exuding empathy, we soon became inseparable. She helped me analyse my emotions in a way no one else had. And she encouraged me to go to our resident therapist.

I gave my first stage performance in Bharathanatyam on Nov 3, 2018. To go on stage, in that broken state, to dance like there is no tomorrow for an hour, was liberating.

The journal submission took shape and we submitted on Nov 15, 2018. We were fairly confident because the proposed method fitted nicely into the areas of the special track. After the submission, I took Purnata’s suggestion and met the therapist. I just sat in therapy, gasping for breath and trying to voice my feelings. She, on the other hand, knew what she was doing. I met her once in two weeks and steadily my mental health improved. On Dec 31, we met our new guide for the first time in Kochi and did a lot of brainstorming. On January 1 in Chennai, I gave my second dance performance. After that, I was soon back to hostel.

On January 10, 2019, we got a desk-reject for our journal. To have your work rejected by your journal without any reviews whatsoever, is one of the most irritating things a researcher has to face. We attempted to reason with the journal editors but to no avail. We then thought of satisfying the journal requirement by presenting this paper at an A* venue. So, we modified the manuscript. Since we did not get comments before, we asked our friend Nikita to have a look at our manuscripts incorporated the suggestions and submitted to SIGIR at the end of January and did not have to worry about it till April. Meanwhile, we worked on a tutorial proposal and submitted that to ACL/NAACL/EMNLP joint tutorial proposal.

We had some unpublished work from our previous research efforts. Before the guide change, I had attempted to submit it to two journals, one of which returned as out of scope and another gave decent reviews on why this cannot be processed further. After Deepak’s meticulous examination of the manuscript, Savitha and I submitted it to a journal on Feb 10, 2019.

Immediately after, the tutorial proposal was rejected.

On March 1, I met with an outlandish accident and ended up with seven stitches on my forehead which led me to believe I now have scars both internal and external. Mid-March I got reviews from the journal asking for a major revision with a deadline somewhere in mid-May. By March-end, we also submitted the tutorial to ECML-PKDD. Then, mid-April I got SIGIR reject. They explained in detail what was lacking in the experimentation section. I submitted the major revision. Then, quite on a spur of the moment, we decided to attempt polishing the SIGIR manuscript and send it to EMNLP. So we sent that by May end. Once again, Deepak was extremely supportive, calling and synchronising across time zones and even managed my goof-up about the deadline. Also, towards every submission deadline, I would find this mountain of bugs much to my chagrin. While we tried to navigate the crashing server, we finally succeeded in uploading the manuscript.

Somewhere in the timeline of the events described above, we had our first accept, the tutorial proposal to ECML-PKDD. Finally, some efforts were starting to bear fruit.

Then, we embarked on the most exciting part of the year, our UK trip for two months where we collaborated with him, on a day-to-day basis. In July, we saw the EMNLP rebuttal period and surmised it is going to be a reject for different reasons. Then, Savitha suggested how we could bring sophistication into the architecture. We performed a vast number of experiments and then came down to the few that were consistent and could be woven into a cohesive contribution. In the midst of all this, in August, our journal contributions were accepted.

Now with the requirement out of the way, we targeted AAAI this time and as the manuscript took shape, I could see there was no possible way we could squeeze more out of it and was quite satisfied with it. It was submitted on Sep 5.

On Sep 20, I presented the tutorial at ECML-PKDD, Germany. Sep 29, I had my third dance performance. Then, on Oct 1, I gave my seminar where for unfathomable reasons, I spoke at the speed of light. Still, the milestone was completed successfully and we embarked on starting our thesis.

Then, a ridiculous period of three days was provided in October for AAAI rebuttal. Deepak always has this motto of going above and beyond the call of duty and we crammed a lot of experiments to substantiate our claims in the rebuttal. Here, my friend Vedavyas annotated my dataset on such short notice, which helped me so much.

I sat with bated breath on Nov 10, the only verdict I cared about. Thanks to the time zone differences, the results came at 6 am local time on Nov 11. I was prepared for an accept or reject. I saw that the status was poster accept and was flummoxed. I did not know that posters at such venues are full paper contributions. The rebuttal played a crucial role in the acceptance as it helped convince our reviewers.

I thought I would write something emotional like this when I get my degree. The AAAI accept hastened my dramatic version of the acknowledgements section of my thesis. And quite frankly, to summarize my PhD, is going to be a novel.

It has been an extremely long journey. I would have been over the moon to just complete my PhD. I had no vision of getting an A* paper and things like that. This took an entire village to execute. And sheer hard work. And a bit of luck :)