Fun at the ISWC
I am sitting in the opening session of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009) right now. The conference chairs normally give stats about where submitted papers are from, primary topics, etc. This time they decided to have some fun. They did a full text extraction on all the papers, removing stop words and names and then running a Porter stemmer on the text. They then came up with the list of words most used in accepted papers and those most used in rejected papers. Finally, they graphed the words by the largest difference in occurrence between the accepted and rejected papers. So if you want to get a paper accepted at a semantic web conference, don’t write about Europeans, users, or people in general. Do write about services and arguments (or, at least, words with the stems ‘servic’ and ‘argu’). At least, that’s the rule this year.
Who says theoreticians don’t know how to have fun?
