David's World

April 21, 2005

Even real academics publish at dubious conferences!

MIT shows us again what people in the community have known for a while: Conferences organized by some "professors" from certain slavic or south-american countries are bogus - they are held to cash in on $1500 conference fees for attendants. These spamferences are rallied for with spam - academic conferences usually issue their "calls for papers" by e-mail, too, so it doesn't look too much like spam. After some grad students from CSAIL (the computer science & AI institute at MIT) staged a big prank to publicize the spamference issue, I looked around on the net and found: a lot of otherwise respectable academics list publications at those bogus conferences.

Let's backtrack first. What happened? CSAIL made a little Natural Language Generator that automatically composes papers: articles that look like scientific publications, but are just randomly generated (albeit syntactically correct) text. They managed to get a paper accepted at one of these spamferences, and they even want to give a randomly generated talk there!

From an NLG perspective, it's not rocket science. In fact, the generated text is neither coherent nor cohesive, that is, broadly speaking, the sentences don't really fit together. The context-free grammars they're proud of using are the most basic thing you could imagine using here. But the SCIgen project, led by Jeremy Stribling et al. from CSAIL, is making a good statement about those bogus conferences.

If you search Google for Nagib Callaos, you'll find a whole bunch of conferences organized by this (alledged) professor from Venezuela, but only one publication, which is thankfully ripped apart by Mark Liberman over at the Language Log.

The SCIgen project's cause is worthwhile for another reason. Surprisingly, academics all over the world submit their hard work to such bogus conferences -- or, worse, they submit papers that didn't get accepted elsewhere. This Google search lists a whole bunch of people that proudly mention a publication at one of N. Callaos' conferences. Were those otherwise respectable academics tricked into publishing at spamferences? Where these workshops and conferences actually real? What's going on?

In other academic news: some guy is deep in brown stuff now. He stole a Berkeley biolgist's laptop with exam documents, but unfortunately, there are other data on the machine. In short, Jasper Rine is mad. (Link to video, audio and transcriptions.)