2011-04-04

Giving readers of your papers easier lives

Many papers are very hard to read. One reason is that they use vocabularies or math notations that are not very recognized by readers.

For a paper on knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR), the targeting readers are mostly AI researchers who may not be necessarily working on KRR. They may work on automated planning or robotics. If your vocabularies or math notations do not match their education background, they will feel very difficult to understand your paper.

In the end, if you really give them a hard time, they will simply send your paper to a shredder.

Then what is the purpose of writing an AI paper that researchers on other AI fields cannot even understand?

And, KRR needs applications. The knowledge is from our common sense, maybe for a particular field, e.g., physics. The reasoning is assist us the better use of common sense knowledge. What if a biologist wants to use your work to help his research? You wanna scare him away in a way worse than how you treat other AI researchers?

A compromising solution, may be, to provide two different ways of saying one thing. One is preferable by people in your field, very precise and professional. The other is understandable for any college science/engineering graduates. High school students cannot understand Einstein's paper about the Theory of Relativity. But they can understand the simplified version on their textbook.

Do you like a dictionary that explains words in advanced words?

When Steve Jobs asked his team to make an easy manual for Macintosh, his team said, it's easy, high school English level. Steve, said, no, i want elementary school level English.

A few days ago I saw a joke. A customer rated his Windows laptop as 1 star because it didn't come with a Windows manual - he used to be a Mac user.

No comments: