CV of Failures

About

My name is Atsuki Yamaguchi. I am a second-year PhD student at the Sheffield NLP Group, with research interests in cross-lingual transfer and efficient language modelling. My journey in NLP has been rich with setbacks and unsuccessful applications (see below), which I think have shaped my academic and professional growth.

Following the tradition of sharing failures in academia, I have decided to list my unsuccessful applications here. While we often focus only on successes, I believe it is vital to acknowledge that many failures lie behind every success.

You can go back to my About page to learn more about successful parts of my career.

Rejected Papers

Titles of rejected papers are withheld for anonymity and will be updated with links upon acceptance or publication.

ACL 2025 Submitted to both ARR 2024 December and 2025 February cycles. Now another revision is under review.

EMNLP 2024 and COLING 2025 Now another revision is under review.

ACL 2024

Now published as: An Empirical Study on Cross-lingual Vocabulary Adaptation for Efficient Language Model Inference, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024.

ACL 2021

Now published as: Frustratingly Simple Pretraining Alternatives to Masked Language Modeling, The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021).

EACL 2021 Despite reviews being quite positive, the paper was rejected. The draft was then shelved due to missing timeliness of the proposed method; and later a quite similar method was proposed by another group.

IJCAI 2020, ECAI 2020, LREC 2020, and ACL SRW 2020

Now published as: Dialogue Act-based Breakdown Detection in Negotiation Dialogues, The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021).

Unsuccessful Scholarship Applications

1. Funai Overseas Scholarship, 2022.
2. The British Council Japan Association Scholarship, 2019.
3. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO) Student Exchange Support Program (Graduate Scholarship for Degree Seeking Students), 2019.
4. Ito Foundation Scholarship, 2018.
5. Nakajima Foundation Scholarship, 2018.
6. Murata Overseas Scholarship, 2018.

Unsuccessful Internship Applications

1. Research Intern, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, 2025.
2. Research Intern, Hugging Face, 2025.
3. Research Intern, Alan Turing Institute, 2025.
4. Research Intern, Apple, 2025.

Unsuccessful Job Applications

1. ML Engineer, BizReach, 2020.

Updated on July 13, 2025