This year I had the cool opportunity to attend EACL 2023. I met a lot of cool people, learned about amazing work, and even got to present at the UNLP workshop. Given the eventful week and the slew of things I did in Croatia, I thought it'd be a good idea to compile some thoughts that came up as I attended my first in-person NLP conference!
I attended ACL online but that format did not work out with me. Walking around Gathertown cannot simulate interacting with people and discussing ideas in person. As the first day came, I was feeling a bit anxious. Mainly because I am still new to the field and the only other person I knew there was my undergraduate advisor and I did not want to follow her around. Another thing that was making me anxious was not feeling confident in my "research discussion" skills (Like can I really talk about research and make sense?). At CUNY there wasn't a big research scene, or even other NLP researchers. It was mainly me and my undergrad advisor, so the research discussions I had were few and I didn't get join research groups/talks until I started working at Google. I didn't feel like I had enough experience to start discussing research papers and I wish I would have had more opportunities to do so.
Despite everything that I was thinking before the conference, I think it went super well. I got to meet a bunch of people, talk about their work, and get inspiration for future research directions. During the conference, I prioritized going to poster sessions. Although the other talks seem interesting as well, some presentations were just pre-recorded so we couldn't ask questions. At each poster session, I had the chance to spend a least a few minutes with each author and ask any questions that came up. This was awesome because I would get very detailed answers, something that is not as accessible when only reading the papers. As more questions came up and we went further into the weeds on the work, and I started seeing how their approach could help me in the project that I'm working on! It didn't really matter if I did not know about the task they were tackling or if the work was completely unrelated to mine, people were always happy to share their thoughts and answer questions. At the end, its a great way to connect and a good way to ask questions about their experience as grad students, industry, or academia. At the end of the day, I had compiled a list of all the papers that stood out and I read when I got back to my hotel room.
I think the main takeaway would be don't be shy! Ask questions! Nobody is going to judge because you asked a "silly" question or you don't know how RoBERTA works or you don't know some random QA dataset. Its okay not to know, just continue asking more questions. Engage in the discussions and get inspired by the work of others! :)