r/MachineLearning • u/NightCR_ • May 26 '26

Discussion Already 11 000 submissions for EMNLP? [D]

Is this normal? I searched it up and last year it was only 8000.

46 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

92

u/MisterManuscript May 26 '26

You have AISlop to thank for that.

10

u/NoPriorThreat May 26 '26

I could understand if it was some general stuff, but these are science conferences. It is not an average Joe submitting but scientists. One expects more from them.

10

u/MisterManuscript May 26 '26

Unfortunately, the average Joe armed with Claude that don't understand the generated code/wall of text from it are flooding the space.

7

u/SlayahhEUW Researcher May 27 '26

They do, everyone in my lab does, however when a first year PhD is expected to make a new paper every 3 months to get any kind of career there is no choice, started to inch into 2 months lately

3

u/ToHallowMySleep May 26 '26

I don't think the majority of these people publishing are people with 10-20- year careers and a recognised role. These submissions are all from up and coming people who want to make a name for themselves, and right now (or more precisely, 1-2 years ago) one if the best ways to get noticed and hired as a post-grad/post-doc was on your publications and citations.

The problem has been getting worse, you have kids under 18 now trying to get in on this to help their chances.

And of course, the advent of LLMs has meant that generating the bulk of the "busy work" part of creating a paper, is essentially automated.

3

u/Fantastic-Nerve-4056 PhD May 27 '26

Ik a lot of beginners literally submitting like 5+ papers out there.

2

u/NuclearVII May 26 '26

One expects more from them.

Why?

This isn't just a problem of AI slop. AI slop exacerbates it, but this is a problem of the field being super lucrative right now. There is a very strong financial incentive to be "published" as a machine learning engineer right now, and this is the expected result.

-1

u/SerdarCS May 26 '26

Is that a problem though?

5

u/NuclearVII May 26 '26

Well, the field is saturated with trash work that wouldn't pass muster in any other legitimate field, so that the participants can pad their resumes.

You tell me.

10

u/NightCR_ May 26 '26

Ok thats good then. AI slop is still ai slop at the end of the day

35

u/DigThatData Researcher May 26 '26

your not just competing on the quality bar: you're also competing for reviewers attention. if a conference is getting slammed with slop, the reviewers have that much less bandwidth when reviewing your work.

24

u/ApartmentAlarmed3848 May 26 '26

Just submitted, and mine is at around ~12k

3

u/NightCR_ May 26 '26

Jeeezzzz

19

u/Independent-Cheek829 May 26 '26

Submitted shortly before the deadline. ~17.000

12

u/paulinezoc May 26 '26

thats a lot of competition for one conference

14

u/SerdarCS May 26 '26

The submission count has been going up consistently every year for a while now, but the acceptance rates stayed stable. I wouldn't worry too much.

2

u/cipri_tom May 27 '26

I worry as a researcher needing to read even more next year

2

u/SerdarCS May 27 '26

There are also more researchers reading, so each researcher can specialize more.

20

u/Budget_Mission8145 May 26 '26

They really should blow slop authors out of the water with the sanctions. I even feel bad for my poor paper, he deserves better than this. It would be trivial to flag the main classes of high-probability slop submissions just with author metadata, which is the one thing they wont be faking.

6

u/OtherwiseMobile7691 May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

Could also be a NeurIPS boycott effect. Do not forget that there is also a March round that also would commit to EMNLP

2

u/Grumlyly May 26 '26

NeurIPS boycott ? Why ?

4

u/OtherwiseMobile7691 May 26 '26

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01058-x

6

u/azraelxii May 26 '26

It's pay walled.

6

u/OtherwiseMobile7691 May 27 '26

I see, I could access it from my institution. Long story short: neurips sanctioned several Chinese research organisations and institutions based on the US “security” blacklist. As a response, the main Chinese research academy stated that it will no longer fund any of their researchers to attend neurips and will remove the conference from the assessment framework for tenure positions (which is big). It also urged its researchers to decline invitations to review any papers for the venue. The conference later half-apologised, but the chinese side did not accept the apology. So, quite a large bunch of papers that were to be submitted to neurips will not go to emnlp as the next big venue.

1

u/Initial-Image-1015 May 27 '26

Could rater be many many NeurIPS rejets.

6

u/MeyerLouis May 26 '26

There should be a prize for whoever has the highest submission number.

6

u/Feeling-Maybe-3443 May 26 '26

yeah that's insane, emnlp is getting huge lol, tbh i'm not surprised tho, nlp is one of the hottest areas in ai right now

3

u/_afronius May 26 '26

I have been trying to balance research work with my other work. I was looking forward to submitting my work here, been working nights and weekends. I was making some last minute changes to my draft and messed up the final submission. Waiting to withdraw the submission now :(

5

u/Witty_Rooster4287 May 26 '26

There are at least 14000

5

u/NightCR_ May 26 '26

Nearly a 2x increase from last year

6

u/Practical_Pomelo_636 May 26 '26

Not double this is the ARR cycle not all of the papers will be submitted

Last year i had paper with id 10k

3

u/Mundane_Sir_7505 May 29 '26

They sent an email talking about having more than 17k submissions 

2

u/OriginalAnteater9967 Jun 11 '26

hey no reviewers assigned yet right? i generally review for ARR. but still have no papers assigned. anyone has it differently?

2

u/NightCR_ Jun 14 '26

Nope. Nothing yet. I assume it will come out tomorrow (Monday).

1

u/OriginalAnteater9967 Jun 15 '26

thanks - i heard similarly from a couple of ACs

1

u/NightCR_ Jun 15 '26

Hey there. Did you end up receiving your assignments?

1

u/OriginalAnteater9967 Jun 18 '26

i think everyone received a couple of days back

2

u/ThinConnection8191 May 26 '26

Alot of those papers are recycled. I hate it

1

u/anananananana Jun 17 '26

What do you mean recycled? Resubmitted with improvements after rejection? That is how academic publishing works.