In some areas the list is certainly not accurate. E.g. in computational linguistics:
- Realization of Natural-Language Interfaces Using Lazy Functional Programming, Frost, 2006. I never ever heard of this article, with only 17 citations overall (in 5 years) it can hardly be considered important.
- In the entry of Transformation-based error-driven learning and natural language processing, Brill, 1995 (which is an important publication) it is stated that it "Describes a now commonly-used POS tagger based on transformation-based learning." Which is not true, since nearly everyone uses HMM, maxent, or SVM taggers these days because they give far higher accuracies.
Although it is far from perfect, the number of citations is probably one of the best manners to count importance. Someone actually did this per year for ACL conferences:
Obviously, there are other conferences, journals, etc. But it gives a pretty good overview of papers that are recommended. Also, there's the ACL top-10 rankings:
- Realization of Natural-Language Interfaces Using Lazy Functional Programming, Frost, 2006. I never ever heard of this article, with only 17 citations overall (in 5 years) it can hardly be considered important.
- In the entry of Transformation-based error-driven learning and natural language processing, Brill, 1995 (which is an important publication) it is stated that it "Describes a now commonly-used POS tagger based on transformation-based learning." Which is not true, since nearly everyone uses HMM, maxent, or SVM taggers these days because they give far higher accuracies.
Although it is far from perfect, the number of citations is probably one of the best manners to count importance. Someone actually did this per year for ACL conferences:
http://www.phontron.com/blog/?p=29
Obviously, there are other conferences, journals, etc. But it gives a pretty good overview of papers that are recommended. Also, there's the ACL top-10 rankings:
http://clair.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.cgi