[funnystories]

when i was on college, i wrote a simple system to make corrections on text based on some heuristics for a class.

then, the teacher of the class suggested me to write a paper describing the system for a local conference during the summer, with some results etc

I wrote it with his support but it got rejected right away because of poor grammar or something similar. the conference was in Brazil, but required the papers to be in English. I was just a student and thought that indeed my english was pretty bad. the teacher said to me to at least send an email to the reviewers to get some feedback, maybe resubmit with the corrections.

i asked specifically which paragraphs were confusing. they sent me some snippets of phrases that were obviously wrong. yes, they were the "before" examples of "before/after" my system applied the corrections. I tried to explain that the grammar should be wrong, but the just replied with "please fix your english mistakes and resubmit".

i tried 2 or 3 more times but just gave up.

[adastra22]

You remind me of these anecdotes by Feynman of his time in Brazil. Specifically search for "I was invited to give a talk at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences", but the whole thing is worth a read if you haven't seen it:

https://southerncrossreview.org/81/feynman-brazil.html

[wizzwizz4]

*eyeroll* Sounds about right. Want to get that published anyway? You could pop it on the arXiv and let the HN hivemind suggest an appropriate venue.

If you don't have arXiv access, find an endorser <https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html>, and send them a SHORT polite email (prioritise brevity over politeness) with your paper and the details. Something like:

> Hello,

> I wrote a paper for college in yyyy (attached) on automatic grammar correction, which got rejected from Venue for grammatical errors in the figures. I still want to publish it. Could you endorse my arXiv account, please?

> Also, could you suggest an appropriate venue to submit this work to?

> Yours sincerely,

> your name, etc

Follow the guidance on the arXiv website when asking for endorsement.

[funnystories]

thank you for the suggestion, but it was just an undergraduate paper written in ~2014. I don't see any relevance in publishing it now.

[wizzwizz4]

It is a lot of effort to get something through the publication process, but if you can't find the technique you used in ten minutes of searching https://scholar.archive.org/, it would be a benefit to the commons if you published your work. At least on a website or something.

[funnystories]

the method I used (I barely remember the details) is similar to this one https://scholar.archive.org/work/idi3kpcrlbfpvkxfxxf5tqr3om

[rgmerk]

I’ve been a reviewer and occasionally written reviews a bit like you describe.

Papers are an exercise in communicating information to the paper’s readers. If the writing makes it very difficult for the audience to understand that information, the paper is of little use and not suitable for publication regardless of the quality of the ideas within.

It is not the reviewer’s job to rewrite the paper to make it comprehensible. Not only do reviewers not have time, it is not their job.

Writing is not easy, and writing technical papers is a genuinely difficult skill to learn. But it is necessary for the work to be useful.

To be honest, it sounds like the teacher who suggested you write the paper let you down and wasted your time. Either the work was worth their time to help you revise it in to publishable form, or they shouldn’t have suggested it in the first place.

[matsemann]

Did you ironically misread their comment, and didn't realize the grammar the reviewers were complaining about was the known bad examples his algo could fix?

[maleldil]

It's hard to believe that the reviewers misunderstood the examples. It's more likely that the surrounding text was badly written, and the reviewers had no idea what they should be looking at.

[jll29]

There is the option of contacting the program committee chair or proceedings editor to complain if the reviewers misunderstood something fundamentally, like it looks like it happened in his example.

The teacher should have fought this battle for the pupil, or they ought to have their efforts re-targeted another conference.

[rgmerk]

Ha!

Sorry, I did miss that. And yes, that sounds like lazy reviewing .

But I have also read many word salads from grad students that their supervisors should never have let go to a reviewer.