EMNLP 2022 in Abu Dhabi

Jia Peng attended the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, from 7 to 11 December. As expected from being one of the top venues in Computational Linguistics, EMNLP 2022 received 4190 full paper submissions, its largest to date. Of these, 829 papers (~20%) made it to the main conference. The opening keynote by Neil Cohn on visual languages of comics was engaging and intriguing. While many presentations and poster sessions were happening concurrently, there is a nice balance of crowds at various points of interest. To top it off, there was a welcome reception and a lavish social event (unfortunately, it rained during the middle of it).

Around the registration booth in Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. Photo taken by Roy

Preferred.AI research group has one paper at EMNLP’22: Towards Reinterpreting Neural Topic Models via Composite Activations, authored by Jia Peng and Hady. Before this work, most Neural Topic Models derive their topics using one neuron to one topic interpretation. In our approach, we use many neurons for one topic interpretation to derive better generalisable topics from existing Neural Topic Models.

Evidence that Jia Peng attended his allotted poster session slot at EMNLP 2022, where he tried to sell his paper to conference attendees.

Abu Dhabi is an interesting place to visit. Jia Peng’s favourite activity is kayaking in the Eastern Mangroves. Compared to the desert, the experience in that nature reserve is on a whole new level.

Kayaking during the sunrise with scholarly friends from Singapore. The water is clear and calm. Photo taken by our wonderful guide Joseph.

This last section is dedicated to food. Abu Dhabi is a multi-cultural place with cuisines from all over the world. Aside from hotel food (which is subpar), Jia Peng notably visited a Din Tai Fung restaurant and a Portuguese cafe. But his favourite came from a Lebanese restaurant Mosaic. Here are some pictures taken by Jia Peng’s travelling companion, Kai Xiong:

Batata Harra, arabic for “spicy potato” and Lebanese in origin, is a truly amazing dish.

Pitta Bread, a staple in middle eastern meals, very versatile and can be paired with many dishes.

Some specialty ice cream. Not only does it taste nice, it smells nice too.

The next EMNLP 2023 will be here in Singapore. See you there (hopefully)!