As a follow-up to my recent post on research tips, I would like to mention that confidence and story-telling is key. Many papers have some flaws, and substantial overlap with existing papers, which becomes especially apparent once you get to know the field. The key is presenting a convincing narative that steers the discussion away from focusing too much on those flaws and similarity. In particular, when you are building the introduction, you want to build and hammer home a singular line of thought, a single progression of thought, which makes it OBVIOUS that YOUR approach is the most logical next step forward. This is despite a lot of “noise” and other approaches in the field! One key point of research is scope. One paper review that I will do is the “What’s in a Name paper” at NAACL 2019.