ACL day #3: Attending poster sessions is strictly superior to oral presentations, and here's why: Watching someone talk on stage for twenty minutes is passive knowledge consumption, but standing by a poster gives you the opportunity to ask questions, actively interact with the knowledge, and fill out holes in your understanding. Actively consuming knowledge better internalizes it than passively consuming it! You get to stress-test your ideas, uncover blind spots, and most importantly - build real human connections. It is simply more effective, and honestly, it is a lot more fun. To those of you who present on stage, just remember that the burden is entirely on you to make it land. Since you do not have the safety net of back-and-forth interaction, you have to be obsessive about how you package the narrative. It is not about making it complicated to show you are smart. You have already been accepted! Now it is time to make it clear and simple, so everybody can actually enjoy the fruits of your hard work 🌟
But oral sessions are great when you need to reply to emails 😀
Same feeling that ACL posters are better than oral presentations which are less inspiring than other conferences such as NeurIPS.
With video presentations already available on Underline for most papers and the session organizers allowing mostly 1 question per oral talk, there is hardly any incentive to attend oral sessions compared to the benefits of posters you talked about above