Graham Neubig Shares Strategies For Selecting Research Topics

Great question about how to come up with research ideas! I think that different people have different ways, but here are some of mine: 1. Working with excellent people -- most of the ideas we tackle at CMU originally come from the people I work with, not me 2. Thinking about impact -- I always ask my collaborators "who is your target audience, and what results will they need to see to be convinced that this is promising" 3. Staying close to real-world use -- as you know, I have a startup and many of the ideas that we have for research come from practical problems we need to solve there too (and sorry about the late reply, I needed to think about this before responding)