NLP Conference Rankings

Google Scholar has some ideas about NLP conference rankings, but these are boring, dry, based on numbers. My method is based on how much fun it is to say the conference acronym. Please adopt this ranking for tenure / promotion / graduation.

1. TACL: easily the best, as in, “I’ll tackle that project after the next deadline.”
2. NAACL: second only to TACL because the double A may lead some to pronounce it “NAHCL”
3. CoNLL: just rolls off the tongue, feels like you’re saying Colin
4. LREC: reminds of “rec center” and that old ASR joke about people who “wreck a nice beach”
5. COLING: also similar to “Colin”, fun to have the accent on the first syllable, as though we are “linging” together.
6. SIGDIAL: has echoes of soap, feels clean, although the “SIG” is a little awkward.
7. BioNLP: this makes me think of the French word for organic – biologique – and, for better or worse, organic food is high class.
8. BEA: I don’t know why I like this, but I do.
9. EMNLP: it flows pretty well, but you miss an ARR deadline in the time it takes to say it.
10. WMT: I respect the conciseness, but no. It’s also very similar to WMD.
11. SLT: have you ever had an SLT when the salmon is nice and lean?
12. EACL: I’ve never heard anyone say anything other than individual letters here, so I have to put it pretty low.
13. ACL: only ever letters, and easily confused with a music festival, and a knee injury.
14. IJCNLP: no one has ever pronounced this acronym all the way through. It is simply too long, with too many incongruent letters.