It has been a good start to 2014 so far with 2 papers accepted.
The first is a conference paper at a large conference called LREC 2014. This will take place in Reykjavik, Iceland at the end of May this year. The paper details some experiments that I performed last year, looking at the distribution of errors in the lexical simplification pipeline. The hope is that if I can show the types of errors and whee they're coming from then I can motivate my research into mitigating these errors. It will certainly make a nice introduction in my thesis. The paper has been accepted for a main track oral presentation. This means that I'll be presenting alongside established researchers in the main event of the conference. It's certainly a mixture of very exciting and somewhat terrifying!
The second paper is published in a special issue of an open access journal (open access means that the publisher allows anybody to read it for free). I was unsure at first of whether to publish with them but a number of factors led me to doing so. The danger of publishing with open access journals, particularly the relatively unknown, is that the quality of the reviewing and the impact of the journal can be very low. In the worst case you can end up paying thousands of pounds for somebody to essentially publish your paper on their blog. The paper I have submitted is a survey paper. I wrote it almost two years ago and have been updating it ever since. It is effectively the background chapter in my thesis. I originally attempted to submit it to a few prestigious journals, but it was rejected for a few different reasons. Survey papers from relatively unknown authors are tough to get published. So, off the back of rejections and updates it seemed sensible to submit to a less prestigious journal. I saw the call for the special issue and thought I'd write up my paper for it. The organisation behind the journal is fairly new (2010), but they do seem to tick the right sorts of boxes. They have an ISSN, they produce print versions of the journal, they don't charge an extortionate fee, the past issues seem well populated with sensible research, etc. The survey paper is well suited to this type of publication as it will appeal to a broad audience and therefore will benefit from open access publishing.
Links (and maybe some more information) will be put up when I have the pdfs.
