colm-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether language-model research belongs at COLM or should route to ACL/EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, or a workshop — applying the object-of-study test, matching against COLM's CFP lanes (training, data, evaluation, inference, safety), and weighing the trade-offs of a young venue before writing begins.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill colm-topic-selection --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# COLM Topic Selection Almost every LM paper *could* be sent to five venues; COLM exists because the authors of such papers kept finding that none of the five was actually about their question. This skill decides whether your project is one of those papers. Run it before the first draft — the March abstract deadline punishes late routing changes. ## The object-of-study test Ask one question: **is the language model the thing being studied, or the tool doing the studying?** - *Studied* — you train, measure, dissect, steer, attack, or critique LMs, and the finding is about LMs themselves. That is COLM's declared identity: a venue for understanding, improving, and critiquing LM technology, created (announced October 2023, first edition 2024) because these questions sat awkwardly at every older venue. - *Tool* — the LM is fixed infrastructure and the contribution lives in a task, domain, or application. Route to the task's home venue; COLM reviewers will ask what was learned about language models and find nothing. A useful second probe: delete the specific model names from your abstract. If the claims survive as statements about language modeling (a training dynamic, a data effect, an
- The object-of-study test
- Routing against the adjacent venues
- COLM's declared lanes (2026 CFP, checked 2026-07-08)
- The young-venue calculus
- Vignette: one project, three venues
- Commit checklist before writing
- Output format
What does the colm-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether language-model research belongs at COLM or should route to ACL/EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, or a workshop — applying the object-of-study test, matching against COLM's CFP lanes (training, data, evaluation, inference, safety), and weighing the trade-offs of a young venue before writing begins.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill colm-topic-selection --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.