Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
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Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#2If I'm dreaming, the ideal outcome of this would be that Springer and IEEE decide to actually apply some kind of scrutiny to the conferences whose proceedings they publish under their names. It's a pretty poorly kept secret that, while they publish some stuff that's top work in several fields, they also publish some total crap that is so bad it's inconceivable someone actually competent has spent even 20 minutes vetting it. But they seem not to care a lot. They (especially the IEEE) are coasting on a name produced through some good work over the years. Much of that reputation is well deserved, but you can only shove so much junk into IEEE Xplore before it loses the cachet it built up in previous years. If they don't shape up, it will reduce the attractiveness of IEEE and Springer for people publishing actually good work as well. Why affiliate your legitimate conference with publishers who have no quality control? The IEEE in particular is a nonprofit organization which is supposed to have a mission to advance engineering, so it's particularly problematic that it wouldn't be doing a better job.
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#3This is quite the deja vu: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
As I remembered it, their "fake" (automatically generated) paper was accepted into a conference. They then tried to submit a second paper that was also auto-generated, and that's when they got caught. I may be confusing the two stories, though.
In any case, it's very easy to generate your own postmodern gibberish papers - every time you visit this page, it refreshes with a new one: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#4Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#5This is quite the deja vu: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ As I remembered it, their "fake" (automatically generated) paper was accepted into a conference. They then tried to submit a second paper that was also auto-generated, and that's when they got caught. I may be confusing the two stories, though. In any case, it's very easy to generate your own postmodern gibberish papers - every time you visit this p…
Sokal's paper was carefully hand-written, so a somewhat different situation. His goal was to show that if you used scientific jargon in a highly metaphorical way that flattered the ideological views of the editors but was pretty hilariously shallow (e.g. casually analogizing the axiom of choice in mathematics to pro-choice politics), it could get accepted. He didn't aim to show that you could auto-generate such a paper, though, merely that a human could construct one.
Unlike the papers here, Sokal's paper is also not really gibberish. It's well-written and coherent in a certain surface-level sense, it's just that what it's arguing is nonsense. It strings together coherent paragraphs out of coherent sentences, in an argument that goes somewhere and which you can follow... but the argument itself is ridiculous, put together out of hilarious non sequiturs and puns masquerading as reasoning. The SciGen papers are gibberish on a much more literal level, in that their paragraphs don't actually make sense, their abstracts don't match the subject in their titles, etc.
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#6This is quite the deja vu: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ As I remembered it, their "fake" (automatically generated) paper was accepted into a conference. They then tried to submit a second paper that was also auto-generated, and that's when they got caught. I may be confusing the two stories, though. In any case, it's very easy to generate your own postmodern gibberish papers - every time you visit this p…
Sokal's paper was carefully hand-written, so a somewhat different situation. His goal was to show that if you used scientific jargon in a highly metaphorical way that flattered the ideological views of the editors but was pretty hilariously shallow (e.g. casually analogizing the axiom of choice in mathematics to pro-choice politics), it could get accepted. He didn't aim to show that you could auto-generate such a pap…
Hm, yeah, I'm definitely confusing them. In any case, I saw this headline and thought, "where is the [2004] tag?", because it was literally exactly the way my friend told me the SCIGen and/or Sokal story back then.
Quite a shock to see that this was 2014.
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#7The papers in question were generated by the SCIGen paper generator. Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and I are the authors of that system, with Jeremy doing the lionshare of the work. The inspiration for SCIgen was TheSpark.com's high school paper generator, which ran from about 1999 to 2001. To call these autogenerated works gibberish is an affront to those of us who hand-assembled their context-free grammars!
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#8It may not be long before passable high school and college essays can be undetectably generated by software. I wonder what we'll do then.
At some point, I guess we'll have writer software that pretty much generates nicely articulated narrative for whatever it is we wish to say. "Write up something about global warming. Make it borderline skeptical, quote the Concerned Scientists and so forth. You know what to say."
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#9It may not be long before passable high school and college essays can be undetectably generated by software. I wonder what we'll do then. At some point, I guess we'll have writer software that pretty much generates nicely articulated narrative for whatever it is we wish to say. "Write up something about global warming. Make it borderline skeptical, quote the Concerned Scientists and so forth. You know what to say."
That would mean that a computer had passed the Turing test which would be...quite an achievement.
Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
#10The papers in question were generated by the SCIGen paper generator. Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and I are the authors of that system, with Jeremy doing the lionshare of the work. The inspiration for SCIgen was TheSpark.com's high school paper generator, which ran from about 1999 to 2001. To call these autogenerated works gibberish is an affront to those of us who hand-assembled their context-free grammars!
This is great work. I'm curious about your motivations. Do you consider it a validation of your work that so many papers were published?