2022-11-24: Update 13/75 - Vacation and Roadmap for 2023

We now have the following timeline for the intended publication of our first article: submit in January ‘23, have a decision in March ‘23, and have the article published between May–June ‘23.

We have already put our article draft in our preferred conference’s format, and the main missing piece is the results section. Some experiments are still running. We are exploring the scaling behavior of NLP models with different training dataset sizes.

I took a vacation and the internet connection at the hotel was slow and unstable. So I decided to skip one week of updates. This update, #13/75, is, therefore, two weeks after the last one (instead of one week).

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^{The Egypt vacation was great. The internet there was not so great.}

What Happened Since Last Week?

We ran more experiments and added literature to the article’s Related Work section. Also, the article now complies with the LaTeX submission and publication format of a conference we aim to publish at.

A word about LaTeX: LaTeX is an alternative to what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) text processors such as Microsoft Word. In LaTeX, one writes markup code similar to HTML and has to compile it to see a PDF output. The advantages of LaTeX are

that it can be used for writing projects of any scale (entire books are written in LaTeX),
its format can be configured quickly (global format settings can be adjusted easily and are immediately reflected in the whole document),
it offers convenient literature management,
it is powerful for typesetting equations,
and more sophisticated typesetting features lead to nicer formatted text compared to more crudely looking Word documents.

But LaTeX has a tough learning curve for beginners, especially for non-technical people. For people new to LaTeX, I recommend using Overleaf, an online LaTeX editor.

What Were the Biggest Obstacles?

Well, the internet connection in Egypt was much worse than expected. I was planning to do research in Egypt. At least, I had an even more relaxing eight days of vacation (due to the bad internet connection)!

Which Goals Did I Meet?

Expand the experiments to additional models. We now have about ten models.
Created a precise submission timeline and publication plan. (Spontaneously added goal; this was not in update #12/75.)
Formatted the article in the required LaTeX submission format of our target conference. (Spontaneously added goal; this was not in update #12/75.)

Which Goals Did I Miss?

Expand the experiments to additional datasets/benchmarks.

Was It a Good Week?

Considering that I was on vacation, these were two productive weeks.

I feel very relaxed and can already notice that I’m more productive after returning from vacation.

Short-Term Tasks for The Coming Week

Expand the experiments to additional datasets/benchmarks.
Make diagrams based on the preliminary experiments.
Finish the literature review for the article.

About “75-Step Journey Toward a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing”

You will, from now on, witness my grind. Feel my blood, sweat, and tears.

With this series of articles, you become a real-life weekly witness of my dissertation progress, all in 75 steps. This has multiple purposes:

1) Forcing myself to keep moving through the power of public shame!

2) Helping other (prospective) Ph.D. students to stay motivated and to show that hard times are normal when going through this process.

3) Getting support from the community when I go through hard times.

Share this with your Ph.D. student friends: Substack Blog Telegram WhatsApp LinkedIn Medium Twitter Calendly.