Category Archives: review

Recommend: The Science of Scientific Writing

George Gopen and Judith Swan. The Science of Scientific Writing. American Scientist. 1990, 78: 550-558.

Our examples of scientific writing have ranged from the merely cloudy to the virtually opaque; yet all of them could be made significantly more comprehensible by observing the following structural principles:

  1. Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb.
  2. Place in the stress position the “new information” you want the reader to emphasize.
  3. Place the person or thing whose “story” a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.
  4. Place appropriate “old information” (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.
  5. Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.
  6. In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new.
  7. In general, try to ensure that the relative emphases of the substance coincide with the relative expectations for emphasis raised by the structure.

Recommend: Rule-based Information Extraction is Dead! Long Live Rule-based Information Extraction Systems!

Publications of EMNLP 2013 are released: http://aclweb.org/anthology/D/D13/

On the list, I found a very interested article “Rule-based Information Extraction is Dead! Long Live Rule-based Information Extraction Systems!“. It discusses the disconnect between industry and academia: while rule-based IE dominates the commercial world, it is widely regarded as dead-end technology by the academia. The following table summarizes the pros and cons of machine learning and rule-based information extraction technologies (reproduced from the above paper).

When to post technology blogs?

Don’t mistake me: I’m not disagreeing with the importance of quality content in posting; on the contrary, I always believe that creating original content is the most essential part of a successful blog. But beyond that, probably we can do a bit better.

When to post is another important aspect for a successful blog. Are certain times better than others? The answer is absolutely Yes, but it depends on the industry and the nature of your group personality. This article only focuses on technology blogs. In this post, I attempt to combine different research resources and draw a few basic posting guidelines by time of hour and day. The timing in the post is relative to the time zone. My main resources include read more