Interesting topics in NLP

Papers for HLT/NAACL are due Friday, but since I'm probably not submitting anything, I'll take this opportunity to write down some thoughts about what NLP seems to care about and what I think it might care about more. Topic-wise, we have several big areas that typically overwhelm conference proceedings:

• Machine Translation
• Summarization
• Language Modeling
• Information Extraction
• Parsing

There's obviously a lot more to NLP than these topics, but these by far recieve the highest publication rate at conferences like ACL, NAACL, HLT and COLING. I think it's fairly obvious why. Each has some strong combination of the "required" two aspects for publication at these conferences:

• Importance (or strong community beliefs thereof)
• Evaluatability (especially on common data sets with common metrics)

There is a third aspect under which contributions can be measured that doesn't seem to play a strong role in our field right now: Interestingness. The problem is that evaluating interestingness is difficult. As pointed out by Sam Roweis at a discussion at the BayesNLP workshop, this is something that SIGGRAPH is very successful at. Perhaps SIGGRAPH papers aren't on the most important or evaluatable topics, but they are certainly interesting. Putting too much weight on interestingness is probably a bad idea, especially if it completely forgoes the other two aspects. But maybe we'd be better off as a community if we had one or two tracks (or perhaps a workshop) that focused exclusively on interesting, new problems, even if they fumble a bit on evaluation and obvious short-term importance. Some topics I care about (i.e., think are interesting) that are not commonly seen at ACL-like conferences are:

• User modeling or personalization in general
  
• CogSci-oriented human-learning or -usage of language
  
• Situated language experiments, in real or simulated worlds
• Super-sentence models of coherence, cohesion, relation between documents
• Tasks involving multiple media (text + {video, images, charts/tables, ...})

I don't expect these thing to actually start appearing soon, and I know there are conferences that focus more on each aspect individually, but I think it's time that our community as a whole starts paying more serious attention to what goes on in these areas.