Individual skill
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.
COLM-Skills/skills/colm-topic-selection/SKILL.md
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# 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