My impressions from the 2018 Edition of LREC in Miyazaki, Japan
Do you remember the first academic conference you ever attended? Mine was LREC 2018, the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference that took place in Miyazaki, Japan, from 7–12 May 2018. This LREC was a lot of firsts for me: First peer-reviewed publication, first time participating in an international conference, first time visiting Asia.
One regard in which the conference completely lived up to my expectations was the quality of the talks and posters. The invited keynotes were great, the oral presentations were short, dense, and clear, the poster sessions were interesting and diverse, and I very much enjoyed being surrounded by so many competent and inspiring people.
Poster Sessions Are Good, Actually
I was going to present my work as a poster, so when I prepared for the conference, I read all there is to read about poster sessions at academic conferences. I started out with Iva Cheung’s Why academic conference posters suck and then went through many pages of an advice blog called Better Posters. At the end, even though I had done all I could to minimize the suckiness of my own poster, I was still nervous about presenting my poster to a bunch of strangers.
Turns out I was nervous for no reason! The poster sessions at LREC were amazing. I had a full conference day to check out other people’s posters before presenting mine on the second day, and I quickly realized that posters are nothing to be afraid of at all. Posters are fun! Most of them were really concise, addressed topics I was interested in or curious about, and were easy to understand even with minimal background knowledge. Being able to chat to the person who did the work, because they were standing right there, usually helped me wrap my head around the problems addressed on the poster and the solutions proposed by the authors.
I loved the way posters helped me start conversations with people, with some of those conversations later turning into the sort of conference friendship where you somehow forget that you’ve only known the other person for a day or two. My favourite conversations around posters were the ones that started with a question from me to the presenter —posing specific questions meant that the other person was able to cater specifically to my level of knowledge, and to the aspects of the topic I was most curious about.
My own poster presentation was exactly the same, just with me in the other role. People walked by, some were curious, we had a chat, they gave a comment or two — that was it. Lots of thanking, too: they thanked me for the explanation, I thanked them for their comments. I’m sure there are a number of things I can improve next time, but as first-time experiences go, this one was pretty pleasant!
You Say Networking, I Say Hallway Track
Talking to interesting people is such a good feeling, and at LREC, I met loads and loads of interesting people. Some of them I met by asking them about their posters; some I knew from former events like summer schools, fall schools, or talks they had given at my university; some I just exchanged some smalltalk with during one of the breaks; some were introduced to me by others that I knew already; some I knew off the internet and finally met in person.
Talking to people is really easy when everyone cares about (some of) the same things. Talking to people is also really, really fun. Throughout all the interesting and fun conversations I had over the course of the conference, I never felt like I was doing “Strategic Networking” just for the sake of making people remember me. I was just hanging out with lovely folks talking about the things I wanted to talk about, having fun, learning new things by the minute.
As an added bonus, the conference days were so packed with content that there was no time at all for any of the conversations to slow down or become awkward or boring. Actually, I would be delighted to spend more time with some of my new friends to keep talking about things we haven’t had time to discuss yet. Good thing our field is so small — I’ll probably only have to wait for the next conference to see at least some of them again and pick up where we left off.
Should I Stay (At The Conference Hotel) Or Should I Go (To A Different One)
This time, I booked a room at the conference hotel. It’s expensive, but it becomes more bearable when you share your room with a colleague, which is what I did. My reasoning for choosing the conference hotel was mainly that I wouldn’t have to take care of transport between my accomodation and the conference venue each morning and night, and I’m glad I made that decision. Of course, sharing a room has the advantage that you always have someone to go exploring with, and the disadvantage that you don’t get a lot of time to yourself, which might be harder for some people than others.
Lots of other conference participants also stayed at this hotel, so I usually ran into someone I knew at the meals outside conference hours, which gave me even more opportunities to talk to friends. (Is this called the Accomodation Track? Maybe it should be.)
The conference hotel was several orders of magnitude more luxurious than anything I would have picked for a private trip. It had a number of restaurants and bars, a hot spring in the basement, and who knows what other specialties on offer to help its guests pass the time during their stay. Unfortunately, my time during my stay was already completely taken up by all the conferencing and socializing I did, so I wasn’t able to fully appreciate the luxurious things the hotel had to offer. I think I might have overpaid here.
However, one of my social highlights of this LREC was the last night, where I wasn’t ready to quit yet after the official dinner was over. I ended up spending another couple of hours in the hotel garden bar with some of the conference attendees whose company I had been enjoying the most. This probably wouldn’t have happened if I had stayed in a different hotel! At last year’s summer school, I was disappointed by the decentral nature of the after-hours social program, because it was never clear who was going to meet where and when. The fact that on the last night of LREC, there was one place that was the place to go made it easier for me to catch some more quality time with new friends.
Livetweeting, It’s a Life of Tweeting
If you’ve looked at my twitter feed during the conference, you probably saw me post a tweet basically every couple of minutes. I did my best to tweet along with all the oral sessions I attended, and to share the posters I found the most interesting, all in real time as the conference was running. Surprise: This is a really exhausting thing to do!
There are two main reasons why I tweeted so much about LREC. First of all, there had been some conferences in the past that I wasn’t able to attend, which I compensated by furiously refreshing the hashtag search on twitter every couple of minutes to see what I was missing out on; with people like me in mind, I felt like I was providing a service that I would have wanted to access if I hadn’t been able to be there myself. Actually, there was also at least one participant at the conference who wasn’t able to hear the oral presentations, and they weren’t being live captioned, so she kept thanking me and other livetweeters for turning at least some of the points the speakers were making into something she could follow as well. I don’t think conference participants like me should be responsible for basic accessibility aids, but since I was going to do it anyway, I’m really happy that people benefitted from my work.
Second, I did it for myself. I almost always take notes when I attend presentations of other people’s academic work. This is usually just scribbling with pen and paper, then filing the page away in a folder called “COOL TALKS I’VE SEEN” (and getting back to that folder a few times a year when I want to look something up). At a big conference like LREC, I was afraid I’d fill so many sheets of paper that I wouldn’t be able to transport them back to Europe after the event. With the added benefit of tweets being (somewhat) searchable, and shareable for other people who might want to know what a particular session was about, I decided to take my notes on twitter this time.
Taking notes helps me pay attention. I’m really proud of myself for paying full attention to at least 200 people for 3 whole days with a minimal amount of breaks. Paying attention helped me figure out which of the papers I want to know more about. When I get back from the conference, I can go through my collection of tweets to revisit those key talks and download the corresponding papers to learn even more about these topics.
What’s Next?
My first conference experience was a really positive one, and I’m grateful to everyone who made it possible —to the LREC organizers, to the wonderful people I met there, to my coauthors with whom I implemented the project I presented in my poster, to my PhD supervisor who encouraged me to go, and to basically everyone who helps me learn more about my field at every opportunity. I feel very much at home in this community. As you can see, I really value the personal contacts that can form in this world, so if you introduced me to someone at some point at LREC, please know that I’m particularly thankful for that.
Since I liked this conference so much, it’s fitting that the next one is coming right up: I’m attending NAACL in New Orleans in June 2018, to present ongoing work from my PhD project in the Student Research Workshop and to fill in for my colleagues who can’t travel there to present their work in the *SEM workshop. I’m looking forward to NAACL, because it’ll be another opportunity for nonstop learning and socializing for several days — two of my most exhausting but also most rewarding hobbies.
