SCIgen: Wikis

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Categories: Academic scandals > Artificial intelligence applications > Formal languages > Hoaxes in science > Natural language generation > Academic publishing

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Updated live from Wikipedia, last check: June 04, 2012 10:24 UTC (49 seconds ago)

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SCIgen
Written in	Perl
Available in	English
Type	Generator
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

SCIgen is a program that randomly generates nonsense in the form of computer science research papers, including graphs, diagrams, and citations. It uses a custom-made context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers.

1 Sample output
2 Prominent results
- 2.1 List of works with noticeable acceptance
3 See also
4 Notes
5 References
6 External links

Sample output

Opening abstract of Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy:^[1]

Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.

Prominent results

In 2005 a paper generated by SCIgen, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper to the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics and the authors were invited to speak. The authors of SCIgen described their hoax on their website, and it soon received great publicity when picked up by Slashdot. WMSCI withdrew their invitation, but the SCIgen team went anyway, renting space in the hotel separately from the conference and delivering a series of randomly generated talks on their own "track." The organizer of all these conferences is Professor Nagib Callaos. The WMSCI was also sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers from 2000 until 2005. The IEEE stopped granting sponsorship to Callaos in 2006, while Callaos received again IEEE sponsorship in 2008.

Submitting the paper was a deliberate attempt to embarrass WMSCI, which the authors claim accepts low-quality papers and sends unsolicited requests for submissions in bulk to academics. As the SCIgen website states:

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website).

– About SCIgen ^[2]

Computing writer Stan Kelly-Bootle noted in ACM Queue that many sentences in the "Rooter" paper were individually plausible, which he regarded as posing a problem for automated detection of hoax articles. He suggested that even human readers might be taken in by the effective use of jargon ("The pun on root/router is par for MIT-graduate humor, and at least one occurrence of methodology is mandatory") and attribute the paper's apparent incoherence to their own limited knowledge. His conclusion was that "a reliable gibberish filter requires a careful holistic review by several peer domain experts".^[3]

List of works with noticeable acceptance

Rob Thomas: Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, 2005 for WMSCI (see above)
Mathias Uslar's paper was accepted to the IPSI-BG conference^[4].
Professor Genco Gülan published a paper in the 3rd International Symposium of Interactive Media Design^[5].
Students at Iran's Sharif University of Technology published a paper in the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation (which is published by Elsevier)^[6]. The students wrote under the false, non-Persian surname, MosallahNejad, which translates literally as: "from an Armed Breed". The paper was subsequently removed when the publishers were informed that it was a joke paper^[7].
A paper titled "Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce" by Herbert Schlangemann got accepted as a reviewed paper at the "International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering" (CSSE) and was briefly in the IEEE Xplore Database ^[8]. The author is named after the Swedish short film Der Schlangemann. Furthermore the author was invited to be a session chair during the conference^[9]. Read the official Herbert Schlangemann Blog for details^[10]. The official review comment: "This paper presents cooperative technology and classical Communication. In conclusion, the result shows that though the much-touted amphibious algorithm for the refinement of randomized algorithms is impossible, the well-known client-server algorithm for the analysis of voice-over-IP by Kumar and Raman runs in _(n) time. The authors can clearly identify important features of visualization of DHTs and analyze them insightfully. It is recommended that the authors should develop ideas more cogently, organizes them more logically, and connects them with clear transitions"