Assistant Professor
Bar-Ilan University

Yanai Elazar 502

On this page, I describe all my academic failures (at least the big ones I remember). Some failures are random, and others are justified. Some are not actually failures, but they often seem so at the moment, but they all suck.

The purpose of this is to showcase that behind any shiny success --- whether it's a paper, a scholarship, or a job, many failures hide behind it. We don't typically discuss them publicly, but it's important to anticipate, acknowledge, and learn how to deal with them.
By making this page public, I hope to help normalize failure and help others (including myself), including those I work with and mentor, understand that failure is part of the process and more common than it appears.

For my main webpage, you can visit here.


Bad News

Tutorial rejected from *ACL 2025
December, 2024
Two papers rejected from NeurIPS 2024
Septermber, 2024
I was not accepted to the Rising Stars in Data Science
September 2024
One paper rejected from COLM 2024
July, 2024
Two papers rejected from ACL 2024
May, 2024
Our work got a D in TACL (meaning that we cannot resubmit the paper to TACL for 1 year)
October, 2023
I was not accepted to the Rising Stars in Data Science
October 2023
Our two papers were rejected from EMNLP 2023
October 2023
Our paper was rejected from TADA 2023
October 2023
We didn't manage to submit a paper to EMNLP 2023 on time
June 2023
We didn't manage to submit a paper to NeurIPS 2023 on time
June 2023
Our paper was rejected from ACL 2023
May 2023
I did not get the NYU-CDS faculty position (I guess - I was never notified)
February 2022

Publications

2025

Calibrating Large Language Models with Sample Consistency
*Qing Lyu, *Kumar Shridhar, Chaitanya Malaviya, Li Zhang, Yanai Elazar, Niket Tandon, Marianna Apidianaki, Mrinmaya Sachan, Chris Callison-Burch
AAAI 2025
paper Bad reviews from ARR Feb24, rejected from COLM24

2024

Measuring and Improving Attentiveness to Partial Inputs with Counterfactuals
Yanai Elazar, Bhargavi Paranjape, Hao Peng, Sarah Wiegreffe, Khyathi Raghavi, Vivek Srikumar, Sameer Singh, Noah A. Smith
Findings of EMNLP 2024
paper Rejected from EMNLP23, desk reject from NAACL24

The Bias Amplification Paradox in Text-to-Image Generation
Preethi Seshadri, Sameer Singh, Yanai Elazar
NAACL 2024
paper D at TACL

Estimating the Causal Effect of Early ArXiving on Paper Acceptance
*Yanai Elazar, *Jiayao Zhang, *David Wadden, Bo Zhang, Noah A. Smith
CLeaR
paper desk-reject from EMNLP23

2023

CIKQA: Learning Commonsense Inference with a Unified Knowledge-in-the-loop QA Paradigm
Hongming Zhang, Yintong Huo, Yanai Elazar, Yangqiu Song, Yoav Goldberg, Dan Roth
Findings of EACL 2023
paper rejected from EMNLP22

2022

Pretrained Language Models are not Foundation Models
Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg
Never published, or appeared online
paper rejected from EMNLP22

Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models and Longer Training
Elron Bandel, Yoav Goldberg, Yanai Elazar
Findings of EMNLP 2022
paper rejected from EMNLP21

Text-based NP Enrichment
*Yanai Elazar, *Victoria Basmov, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty
TACL 2022
paper C → B → A at TACL

2021

Revisiting Few-shot Relation Classification: Evaluation Data and Classification Schemes
Ofer Sabo, Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg, Ido Dagan
TACL 2021
paper C → B → A at TACL

First Align, then Predict: Understanding the Cross-Lingual Ability of Multilingual BERT
Benjamin Muller, Yanai Elazar, Benoît Sagot and Djamé Seddah
EACL 2021
paper rejected from EMNLP20 as a long paper

2020

It’s not Greek to mBERT: Inducing Word-Level Translations from Multilingual BERT
Hila Gonen, Shauli Ravfogel, Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg
Third BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, at EMNLP 2020
paper rejected from EMNLP20

The Extraordinary Failure of Complement Coercion Crowdsourcing
Yanai Elazar, Victoria Basmov, Shauli Ravfogel, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty
Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP, EMNLP 2020
paper Literally a negative result paper

Unsupervised Distillation of Syntactic Information from Contextualized Word Representations
*Shauli Ravfogel, *Yanai Elazar, Jacob Goldberger, Yoav Goldberg
Third BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, at EMNLP 2020
paper rejected from ICLR20, EMNLP20

At Your Fingertips: Extracting Piano Fingering Instructions from Videos
Amit Moryossef, Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg
Never published
paper rejected from ICLR20,IJCAI20,ISMIR20

oLMpics -- On what Language Model Pre-training Captures
Alon Talmor, Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg, Jonathan Berant
TACL 2020 (presented at EMNLP 2020)
paper C → B → A at TACL

2019

Adversarial Removal of Demographic Attributes Revisited
Maria Barrett, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Yanai Elazar, Desmond Elliott, Anders Søgaard
EMNLP 2019
paper rejected from ACL19

Where's My Head? Definition, Dataset and Models for Numeric Fused-Heads Identification and Resolution
Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg
TACL 2019 (presented at EMNLP 2019)
paper C → B → A at TACL

2018

Adversarial Removal of Demographic Attributes from Text Data
Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg
EMNLP 2018
paper rejected from ACL18