Need better error messages when the paper is just not in the ACL format

[ryancotterell]

I tried checking an ICML-formatted paper and it threw an unintelligible error message.

[mrdrozdov]

I saw this error:

Your citation for Language Models are Few-Shot Learners might have incorrect author names.

Please correct the citation by visiting this url: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/hash/1457c0d6bfcb4967418bfb8ac142f64a-Abstract.html

The author #20 name should be Christopher Hesse.

Although I used exactly the bibtex provided at that URL.

@inproceedings{NEURIPS2020_1457c0d6,
 author = {Brown, Tom and Mann, Benjamin and Ryder, Nick and Subbiah, Melanie and Kaplan, Jared D and Dhariwal, Prafulla and Neelakantan, Arvind and Shyam, Pranav and Sastry, Girish and Askell, Amanda and Agarwal, Sandhini and Herbert-Voss, Ariel and Krueger, Gretchen and Henighan, Tom and Child, Rewon and Ramesh, Aditya and Ziegler, Daniel and Wu, Jeffrey and Winter, Clemens and Hesse, Chris and Chen, Mark and Sigler, Eric and Litwin, Mateusz and Gray, Scott and Chess, Benjamin and Clark, Jack and Berner, Christopher and McCandlish, Sam and Radford, Alec and Sutskever, Ilya and Amodei, Dario},
 booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
 editor = {H. Larochelle and M. Ranzato and R. Hadsell and M.F. Balcan and H. Lin},
 pages = {1877--1901},
 publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
 title = {Language Models are Few-Shot Learners},
 url = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/file/1457c0d6bfcb4967418bfb8ac142f64a-Paper.pdf},
 volume = {33},
 year = {2020}
}

[ryancotterell]

This is actually correct. If you look at the paper https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/file/1457c0d6bfcb4967418bfb8ac142f64a-Paper.pdf, the name is Christopher, so the bibliography should reflect that. The NeurIPS website is off. This particular line of code is used to detect when authors have transitioned and changed their names -- exact match is the only reasonable way of doing that.

[mrdrozdov]

Wow, great catch. Thanks!