This is a summary of the writing tips that I always nag to the students. The slides were created by my student Hongkai Wu, while he was struggling to write his Master's thesis.

1. Tips for Paper Writing

2. • Before you write a paper
• When you are writing a paper
• The expression

3. Before you start writing a paper
• State your Contribution
• Organize your paper structure, See Everything as a Facet on the
Contribution

4. Before you start writing a paper: state your
contribution
• Think very clearly about what is your contribution in the paper, WHAT
MAKES YOUR WORK DIFFERS FROM PRIOR WORK
• you won’t want to claim your contribution bigger than it is. This might
require you to know pretty well about other people’s work.

5. Before you start writing a paper
• State your Contribution
• Organize your paper structure, See Everything as a Facet on the
Contribution

6. Before you start writing a paper: organize
your paper structure
• See Everything as a Facet on the Contribution
• The introduction motivates the need for your contribution.
• The related work section differentiates prior work against your claimed
contribution.
• The method section typically provides a description of the contribution.
• The experiments verifies that your contribution works as advertised.
Etcetera.
• Don’t just put everything you have done in the paper. In fact, much of
them might be irrelevant.

7. Contribution
Introduction
(motivation):
1. …
2. …
3. …
Related work (differentiates
prior work against your
claimed contribution):
1. …
2. …
3. …
……
What should be written
in the 1,2,3?
We will talk about it later

8. When you are writing
• A formal writing pattern
• Provide Continuation Markers
• Ideal Structure of a Paragraph

9. When you are writing: A formal writing
pattern
• The writing pattern:
• Problem clarification / concept definition
• Prior work and its weakness
• Your work and its strength (why you do this). Do not just tell the reader what you do,
but also tell them why you try to do it in this way
• Clarify: you want to tell more about your work.
• A positive ending: This improves the model’s efficiency in …… area
• This writing pattern is applicable tothe whole paper, to each section and
even to paragraph. Ensure that the structure of the content aligns well
with the writing pattern because the pattern is readily perceived by the
reader.

10. • A good example: ABSTRACT from Filip Radlinski’s paper: Active
Exploration for Learning Rankings from Clickthrough Data
• We address the task of learning rankings of documents from search
engine logs of user behavior. Previous work on this problem has relied
on passively collected clickthrough data. In contrast, we show that an
active exploration strategy can provide data that leads to much faster
learning. Specifically, we develop a Bayesian approach for selecting
rankings to present users so that interations result in more
informative training data. Our results using the TREC-10 Web corpus,
as well as synthetic data, demonstrate that a directed ex- ploration
strategy quickly leads to users being presented im- proved rankings in
an online learning setting. We find that active exploration
substantially outperforms passive obser- vation and random
exploration.

11. Contribution:
I utilize the ontology to model user exploration in dynamic search,
instead of utilizing click data or query changes
I model the user exploration on the ontology as a RL problem, use
the concepts in dynamic search to defines symbols’ meanings in RL
Introduction:
- Definition of dynamic search, the user explorations in
dynamic search
- Prior work: utilize query change, click data to model
user explorations in dynamic search
- My work: Propose to utilize ontology to model user
explorations in dynamic search
- Clarify: The challenge I meet and how to solve it
- My work: use RL to model the user’s exploration on
the ontology
- Clarify: the challenges and solutions
Related work:
- Dynamic search, Model user exploration in dynamic
search, Utilize query changes to model …, Utilize
click data to model …
- Ontology: the strength of ontology
- RL: introduce RL, prior work about RL which is
applied to dynamic search

12. When you are writing
• A formal writing pattern
• Provide Continuation Markers
• Ideal Structure of a Paragraph

13. When you are writing: Provide Continuation
Markers
• Continuation markers are sentences or paragraphs, typically at the
beginning of sections, to tell the reader what will be presented next
and to tell the reader how it is relevant or how it relates to what has
been presented already. It provides structure and flow, connecting
the different parts of the paper. You also might want to remind
readers of your contribution in this part.

14. • A good example: We now describe our model for tracking fast moving
objects. While the motion model is standard, the observation model
for raw ToF captures is a novel contribution.“
• What to do next in the section: We now describe our model for
tracking fast moving objects.
• Connect to prior work: While the motion model is standard
• Connect to the contribution: the observation model for raw ToF
captures is a novel contribution.
When you are writing: Provide Continuation
Markers

15. When you are writing
• A formal writing pattern
• Provide Continuation Markers
• Ideal Structure of a Paragraph

16. When you are writing: Ideal Structure of a
Paragraph
• One paragraph should contain only a single idea or a single point of
argumentation.
• The beginning and the end of a paragraph glue the paragraph into the
surrounding content.
(not for abstract, but for all other parts in your paper)

17. When you are writing: Ideal Structure of a
Paragraph
• only a single idea
• bad writing:
"As already mentioned to our knowledge (Argyriou et al., 2006) were the first to note the
possibility of an infinite set of base kernels and they also stated the subproblem (Problem
1). We will defer the discussion of the subproblem to the next section and shortly
comment on the differences of the Algorithm of (Argyriou et al., 2006) and the IKL
Algorithm. We denote with gg the objective value of a standard SVM classifier with loss
function LL."
• good writing:
(Argyriou et al., 2006) first recognized the possibility of an infinite set of base kernels and
we now discuss the connection to our work.
To make the connection explicit we first establish the notation we will use throughout the
paper. We use gg to denote the objective value of a standard SVM classifier, where LL is the
loss function.

18. • From Sebastian Nowozin: To achieve a good structure, here is a recipe
that works for me. For a section I would like to write I make a list of
bullet points of things I want to say, with one bullet point being a
single idea or important point. Each point may have one or more
dependencies on other points and I use the dependencies to order
the list. Finally, I write one paragraph for each item on the list and I
may add an additional paragraph at the beginning and end of the
section to connect the section to the surrounding content.

19. When you are writing: Ideal Structure of a
Paragraph
• Beginning and Ending of your paragraph:
• It is simpler to read and makes it clear why we introduce the notation.
Also note the end and beginning of the two short paragraphs:
• the end of the first paragraph tells you what comes next ("the
connection to our work"),
• the beginning of the second paragraph tells you how this is done
(through notation).

20. • bad writing:
"As already mentioned to our knowledge (Argyriou et al., 2006) were the first to
note the possibility of an infinite set of base kernels and they also stated the
subproblem (Problem 1). We will defer the discussion of the subproblem to the
next section and shortly comment on the differences of the Algorithm of (Argyriou
et al., 2006) and the IKL Algorithm. We denote with gg the objective value of a
standard SVM classifier with loss function LL."
• good writing:
(Argyriou et al., 2006) first recognized the possibility of an infinite set of base
kernels and we now discuss the connection to our work.
To make the connection explicit we first establish the notation we will use
throughout the paper. We use gg to denote the objective value of a standard SVM
classifier, where LL is the loss function.

21. Pay attention to your expression
• Use Simple Language
• Avoid Ambiguous Relative Pronouns (This, These, That, Which)

22. Use Simple Language
• Concepts and ideas in scientific papers can at times be complex but
the writing used to describe them should remain simple. Simple
writing has short sentences, a clear logical structure, and uses
minimal jargon. Writing papers is not poetry but still requires you to
pay attention to the language you use. Use Simple Language

23. Avoid Ambiguous Relative Pronouns (This,
These, That, Which)
• When used properly, a relative pronoun, such as "this", "these",
"that", "which", can effectively refer to a previously mentioned noun,
and that has to be remembered by the reader.
• In the previous sentence, which entity did "that" refer to? Is it "a
previously mentioned noun"? Or is it "a relative pronoun"? Or is it the
proper use?