🤗 Paper Style Guide

(Work in progress, send a PR!)

Libraries to Know

• booktabs
• natbib
• cleveref
• Either seaborn, plotly or altair for graphs
• algorithmicx

General

• When in doubt use sections -> Introduction, Background, Model, Training, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion.
• Tables should always follow this guide
• Tables / Figures should always float. Never inline in the text.
• When using natbib, \citet is for when the citation is a noun, and \citep is for when it is at the end.
• Captions should be short but fully self-explanatory of the columns / rows. They should not use 1st person.
• Abstracts should be 1 paragraph. When in doubt -> Context, Problem, Idea 1, Idea 2, Results.
• Section titles should be starting-caps.
• The goal of related work is not just to list papers, but to explicitly make claims as to how your work differs from each one.
• Figures should have a white background and large fonts. Do not screenshot! Generate a high-res, pdf output.
• Use present tense (almost) everywhere.
• You do not need a summary paragraph at the end of your intro.
• All empirical results must be in a table or figure.
• Methods section should not introduce new modeling. Enumerate the tasks, baselines, hyperparameters.
• Results section should not introduce new tasks or models. Summarize the tables.
• Any non-trivial notation should be introduced as early possible. Ideally background.
• 8 pages is an extremely hard limit.
• Always use `` '' for quotes not " ".
• Use bold sparingly. Opt for italics for new technical terms.

Small Tips

• Turn off \usepackage[review]{emnlp} to \usepackage[]{emnlp} while editing to fix overleaf linking.
• Use \newcommand{\todo}[1]{{\small\color{red}{\bf [*** Todo: #1]}}} for inline comments.

Links

• Rational Reconstruction https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224u/readings/shieber-writing.pdf
• ICML paper blog https://icml.cc/Conferences/2002/craft.html

Exercises

• What are the 3 contributions of the paper?
• Do my experiments convincingly prove each of these are true?
• Can I cut anything that does not satisfy these?
• Would someone who has not read a paper in 2 years understand what is happening?