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Automatic computer-science research paper generator

By AdamSmith, in The Beer Bar

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AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

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Somewhat hilarious.

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

About

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

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). There's also a list of known bogus conferences. Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005! See Examples for more details.

We went to WMSCI 2005. Check out the talks and video. You can find more details in our blog.

Generate a Random Paper

Want to generate a random CS paper of your own? Type in some optional author names below, and click "Generate".

Author 1:
Author 2:
Author 3:
Author 4:
Author 5:

SCIgen currently supports Latin-1 characters, but not the full Unicode character set.

Examples

Here are two papers we submitted to WMSCI 2005:

Talks

Thanks to the generous donations of 165 people, we went to WMSCI 2005 in Orlando and held our own "technical" session in the same hotel. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The session included three randomly-generated talks:

As promised, we videotaped the whole thing. You can download the resulting movie, titled Near Science, below. Movie length: 13:15.

Trouble playing the AVI? Try downloading a DivX codec for Windows or Mac, or try the open source VideoLAN player.

You can read more about the trip here, and check out some pictures here.

Many thanks to everyone who made this possible, especially Tadd Torborg and family, Open Clipart, the PDOS research group, and of course all the SCIgen donors.

Code

The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is currently available via anonymous CVS.

% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:/cvs login Logging in to :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:2401/cvsCVS password: _press return_% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:/cvs co -P scigen

We're still working on documentation and making it more user-friendly, but you should be able to figure most of it out from the code. Here's what you need on your computer to run it (we've run it on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux platforms):

If you would like to contribute code to this project (i.e., by helping us expand our context-free grammar with more sentences, nouns, etc.), please contact us with any patches and we'll apply them if they seem reasonable. We hope to set up a better system sometime in the near future.

Running the code. We've been getting a lot of questions about how to run the code. There are quite a few misleading files in the source -- sorry about that. All you need to do to generate a paper is to run make-latex.pl (also look at make-latex.pl --help). You can also use scigen.pl to generate any arbitrary starting target. See scirules.in for most of the grammar rules.

Donations

As indicated above, one of our generated papers got accepted to WMSCI 2005. Our plan was to go there and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face. However, this is very expensive for grad students such as ourselves. So, we asked visitors to this site to make small donations toward this dream of ours; the response was overwhelming.

Amount of donations: $2401.43 (after PayPal fees)
Number of donations: 165
Amount of time: 72 hours

We used this money to hold our own session at the same hotel as WMSCI 2005.

Related Work

Other papers:

Other generators: Other SCIgen successes:

People

We are graduate students in the PDOS research group at MIT CSAIL.

Contact us at this email address: scigen-dev at the domain pdos.csail.mit.edu

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

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MsGuy Grand Master

MsGuy

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LOL, after many (ok--two) attempts to decipher Professor Calaos's statement of his organization's methodology, I'm wondering if the good professor has devised a content free grammar based automatic writing program for his own use.

"Our methodological strategy will be a systemic, not a systematic one. To organize the editorial process and to manage the publishing operational activities will be done with an open, adaptable and evolutionary methodological system. It will have the flexibility required to adapt the journal, its editorial policy, its organizational process and its management to the dynamics of its related areas and disciplines, to changes produced by the inherent learning process involved, and to the uncertainty of the environment. It would be a matter of applying Ashby’s Requisite Variety principle, concepts related to Prigogine’s dissipative structures and other basic principles found in General Systems Theory, General Systems Methodology and Cybernetics. Consequently, we will not have a deterministic and a completely pre-conceived systematic editorial methodology, nor completely pre-determined and static editorial policy, but, in both cases, they will be open, flexible, adaptable and evolutionary. "

:logik::pinch::shocked::sick:

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Lucky Grand Master

Lucky

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I cannot understand what this is all about, other than some auto-generating plan for college students to get their papers written and in on time.

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MsGuy Grand Master

MsGuy

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Lucky, some years back a guy by the name of Alan Socal submitted (and had accepted :lol: ) a completely nonsense paper to a respectable literary journal. The paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" , was stuffed higgledy piggledly with whatever academic buzz words and concepts were fashionable in literary criticism at the time. Shit storm and much hilarity ensued as left wing feminist theory borrows heavily from this particular school of thought (or non-thought).

See the second link above under "other papers" toward the end of the other post.

Socal's paper was addressing what he saw as wooly-headed intellectual fraud in academia whereas the paper AS is posting about really is more about a finantial scam run by some ex prof who basically pretends to run a legitimate scientific journal but accepts all papers submitted on payment of his "editorial" fees. He preys on post grads and junior academic types desperate to publish a paper.

AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

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As footnote to MsGuy's A+ exegesis (honorarium is in the mail :D ), Sokal's aim was to burlesque the wilder applications of social construction theory (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism), reasonable enough at base (arguably) but which has gotten way out of bounds and metastasized into a pathology warping many aspects of academic inquiry where it has no business. See Critique section in the Wikipedia article, and more extended vivisections such as The Social Construction of What? http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0674004124

The tie-in to the MIT computer scientists' satirical project is that even their discipline has become infected by the clotted mode of discourse spawned by the social constructionists. Who themselves picked up some of their worst habits from post-structuralist and deconstructionist theorists, q.v. (Almost all of whom were French. Except for one of the worst, who was Belgian. :lol: Hmm...)

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MsGuy Grand Master

MsGuy

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Almost all of whom were French. Except for one of the worst, who was Belgian. :lol: Hmm...

I'll bet he was a Belgian of the Walloon persuasion.

A Frog is a Frog is a Frog even if he holds a Belgian passport.

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MsGuy Grand Master

MsGuy

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And the band plays on.

More than 120 scientific and engineering papers have had to be withdrawn by publishers after Cyril Lobbe of Fourier University developed a program to automatically detect papers written by gibberish generator SCIgen.

You'd think someone would have figured this out by now.

AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

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Besides the gaping hole in peer review, another point that struck me is the article's note that most of these papers were first accepted by conferences held in China. From myself getting more and more invites to come speak at professional events in China -- usually in nice coastal cities, in nice hotels -- I see the Chinese have caught on to the lucre to be made from the conference biz.

Even as a speaker at any of these things, I would have to pay the registration fee (usually US$500-1000 -- quite unlike many Western events where speakers are given free admission). And of course pay for my hotel room, for which the conf organizer gets a commission from the hotel. These programs usually get just enough legitimate speakers, lured by the nice vacation and paid for by their employer which doesn't know the difference, to offset the lightweights (to be charitable) who fill most of the speaking slots. Close to the human equivalent of those fraudulent papers.

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RA1 Grand Master

RA1

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I didn't realize that AS was a "twink spider" but I suppose all things are possible. ^_^

I, too, have been invited to functions where I would get a plaque or document suitable for framing and it would ONLY cost me hundreds or maybe low thousands to attend. PT Barnum lives.

Best regards,

RA1

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MsGuy Grand Master

MsGuy

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I had a friend who was invited to have herself listed in something called "Who's Who in American Academia" or some such. Only cost a couple of hundred bucks.

I got the giggles when she bragged to me about it; she got highly offended, lol, and I back tracked and tried to explain it was a scam.

Not much luck with that effort. She wanted to believe she was being recognized & honored for her outstanding academic work, so believe it she did. Silly woman believed in gypsy fortune tellers too and lit candles to a little statue of St. Jude (patron saint of lost causes among other things). And got really loud when she felt you had crossed her :nuke: (did I forget to mention she was 1/2 Sicilian?).

I just shut up. It was only a couple hundred dollars and it made her happy. Besides she was a good cook and I liked being invited over to eat.

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lookin Grand Master

lookin

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I just shut up. It was only a couple hundred dollars and it made her happy. Besides she was a good cook and I liked being invited over to eat.

You might want to slip a little to the dog first. :rolleyes:

DOG-TABLE-SCRAPS.jpg

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MsGuy Grand Master

MsGuy

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Naw, I just pretended to change my mind & let her think she had persuaded me the publication was legit. Wasn't hard 'cause she wanted to believe that too. :lol:

I'll put up with a lot if you make good pasta.

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