Stop force-lowercasing paper titles

[leondz]

Currently, non-initial capitals in paper titles are lowercased. For example,

title={BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding}

renders in the bibliography as:

Bert: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding

This unrequested decapitalisation can make bibliography entries a little hard to read, and is often slightly time-consuming to amend, as authors have to e.g. insert extra braces { } into individual paper titles to get the intended capitalisation back.

This pull request stops the force-lowercasing and instead preserves the casing used in the .bib file, removing this sometimes slightly annoying decapitalisation behaviour.

[mbollmann]

In principle, the lower-casing is a feature, not a bug. Bibliography styles can include rules for how titles should be capitalized, and APA style, which the ACL style is modeled after, says that titles should be written "using sentence case". I am pretty sure that's where the lower-casing in the .bst file comes from.

We can decide, as a community, that we don't care about this aspect of the citation style anymore (especially since I strongly assume that no one has actually enforced or checked it for any *ACL proceedings recently ...), but be aware it's a functional change to the citation style, not a bug fix.

Note though that the only way to use the same BibTeX file with a variety of different templates/bibliography styles — if you ever intend to do that — and get the correct formatting for references, is to use curly braces in the BibTeX file the way they are intended, i.e. to protect acronyms or capital letters in proper nouns.

[leondz]

Sure, I think that's all pretty clear. This is to simplify the user experience, and lightly demystify one thing for newcomers, nothing more.

[davidweichiang]

Also, the Anthology automatically protects words that appear to be acronyms, like BERT.