Transcript Ashish Sabharwal's slides

How to Make Your Review More Relevant?
Ashish Sabharwal, IBM Watson Research Center
Who Typically Writes Reviews?
Who is the Review For?
(important / impactful / useful)
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AAAI-2013: ~3500 reviews written
~70 SPC members, Area Chairs, …
400-600 PC members, Sub-Reviewers, …
• Program Chairs / SPC: they need to make a yes/no decision!
• Authors: they need feedback to improve the paper…. But improve for whom?
• Eventual Readers of the paper!
1) Read beyond Grammatical Errors
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Don’t waste your valuable time tracking/listing everything (a few examples suffice)
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But also don’t down-evaluate novel ideas just because of poor grammar!
2) “Sanity Check”: Do I understand the key idea? Does it make sense?
Do I roughly see why it is good, or even correct??
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Reviewer’s own intuition / words / alternative argument can help authors
see and explain their findings to the reader in a different light
3) Build your (scientific) opinion based on facts + some (unbiased) intuition
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When you write a review, mean it! Be open to change but don’t be afraid to be different
AAAI 2013 Reviewing Panel
© 2013 IBM Corporation