Ehud Reiter

I am a computer scientist who works on natural language generation and evaluation, often in healthcare contexts. I teach at Aberdeen University.

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

@tdietterich Well said- "an increase in thin papers of narrow scope, as well as ‘salami’ papers, where a single work is broken up and submitted as a set of smaller papers. There is also a marked increase in dense, AI-written papers. AI tools [allow] authors to flood arXiv [with] low-value pap

[Thomas G. Dietterich @tdietterich]

I encourage authors to publish "best publishable units" rather than "least publishable units"! end/

[Wei Zhao @andyweizhao]

Going to EMNLP 2026 in Budapest?

We are looking for 20-30 EMNLP attendees to help us understand how you handle language barriers during a conference trip.

Contact Yujun Wang: [email protected]
Please share!
@EhudReiter @mar_kar_ Pinzhen Chen, Yujun Wang

[Thomas G. Dietterich @tdietterich]

Attention arXiv authors. Because of the exponential increase in submissions, arXiv is limiting the number of papers that a person can submit each month to two. 1/

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

Next week I am giving an invited talk at a workshop on AI in Rabbinic/Talmud studies, in Israel. Never done anything like this before, will be really interesting to see how AI is used in this space.

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

I see lots of posts "our lab has N papers in VENUE". Congratulations, but what is more useful to me is short 3-5 line descriptions of a paper which will convince me to open it and read abstract. With link to final (not submitted) version.

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

Excited that my student Yujun Wang will present (oral) at EMNLP on "Beyond Accuracy: Community Perspectives on Machine Translation". Many of my students have looked at stakeholder requirements/concerns. Need to underdstand in order to align AI with humans!
https://t.co/rR9hVBNODZ

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

AI is improving productivity in science, but so far this has led to a flood of low-quality spam and large amounts of so-so papers. I dont see increase in the really high-quality research that science needs! Maybe blame perverse incentives in science that priotitise quantity.

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

If AI is risk to humanity, it is because of human stupidity. In 1983 hallucinating Soviet satellite almost started nuclear war, stopped by sensible human. In 2026, hallucinating AI almost led US military to attack Chinese ship, due to poor human oversight
https://t.co/Pxk0aMBDhS

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

I love the phrase "paper-shaped objects" in below

"modern AI systems can generate paper-shaped objects even for users who are unfamiliar with the related work and writing conventions for a given area,"

https://t.co/RTYnp82qEu

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

I see submissions from people who are trying to learn how to do research using LLMs. This is dubious, and do not expect TACL (etc) to teach research skills! I suggest you get involved with local research: attend workshop, join seminar series, help in a research project, etc

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

New blog: Localising NLG content in a driving feedback system

NLG systems need to localise content for different countries and cultures. Two of my PhD students have written a nice case study paper about this for INLG, in a driving feedback domain.

https://t.co/yppVPVCcIa

[Gautam Kamath @thegautamkamath]

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers.

He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

@Auss_Abbood agreed, hopefully we will be able to rationalise the TACL website and template in the not-too-distant future

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

Im doing format desk reject for TACL. Figs must be readable, and appendices are limited to 5 pages for reproducability, and 3 for additional figs/tables (NOT free text). Good scientific writing is concise, we dont want shrunken figs or bloated appendices!

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

Congratulations to my student @MengxuanS for passing her PhD viva with minor corrections! Mengxuan's thesis was on Designing and Evaluating Natural Language Processing Tools for Patient-Centred Communication in Cancer Care

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

@prateekdwv Hi, I appreciate that "slicing" research into small chunks is a problem. But Im not sure your suggestion will reduce submissions from "authors" who ask LLMs to write spam papers, which is what I was talking about above

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

Years ago you only needed papers when applying for job as post-doc or faculty. Now secondary-school students are using LLMs to write papers, to help them get into a good UG university... Inevitable result is wave of AI slop, which (as below) "authors" may not even understand.

[Thomas G. Dietterich @tdietterich]

We are seeing a new trend in submissions to @arxiv (and presumably to conferences and journals): Authors submitting papers whose contents they likely do not understand. 1/

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

@LeoBrierR Sounds very worthwhile, good luck!

[Thomas G. Dietterich @tdietterich]

We are seeing a new trend in submissions to @arxiv (and presumably to conferences and journals): Authors submitting papers whose contents they likely do not understand. 1/

[Ehud Reiter @EhudReiter]

New blog: Desk rejection is an unfortunate necessity

Editors can desk reject papers without sending them to reviewers, eg because of wrong format or weak content. I dont like doing this, but flood of “AI slop” papers makes this an unfortunate necessity.

https://t.co/RSMtPwGauJ