--- name: kdd-writing-style description: Use when revising a KDD paper into the venue's register, where the first page names a data regime, a mechanism, and scale evidence, efficiency adjectives trace to design decisions, and two-column sigconf pages punish sprawl. Covers Research vs ADS voice, dataset-size discipline, assertive contribution bullets, and 8-page compression. --- # KDD Writing Style Use this during revision passes. KDD prose has a recognizable register: it talks about **data regimes** (scale, drift, sparsity, heterogeneity, label scarcity) rather than model families, it attaches every performance adjective to a mechanism, and it treats dataset cardinalities as part of grammar — a dataset without a size reads as unfinished. The `resources/worked-examples/01-introduction.md` file shows a full before/after; this skill is the rule set behind it. ## First-page contract Within page one, a KDD reviewer expects to find, in some order: 1. The **data regime** that makes the problem hard (not "X is important"). 2. Why existing method families fail **in that regime**, each for a mechanism-level reason. 3. The **named mechanism** this paper adds (a primitive someone could re-implement). 4. Evidence scoped with numbers: dataset scale, throughput or memory if claimed, headline quality delta. 5. For ADS: where this is deployed and the post-launch headline number. If the introduction could open an ICML or a database paper unchanged, the framing is not yet KDD's. ## Register rules | Draft habit | KDD-register rewrite | Why it matters here | |---|---|---| | "novel framework" | Name the mechanism: "drift-weighted sketch family" | Frameworks are unreviewable; mechanisms are ablatable | | "large-scale experiments" | "3 graphs, 10M-2.1B edges" | Scale is the venue's currency; unquantified scale reads as small | | "efficient" | "O(1) update; 1.4M events/s on one core" | Efficiency claims must be attributable and checkable | | "significantly outperforms" | "+3.3 AUPRC, median of 5 seeds, IQR ±0.4" | Practitioner reviewers distrust unquantified superlatives | | "real-world data" | Name the datasets and their provenance | "Real-world" without provenance signals toy benchmarks | | "can be applied to many domains" | One demonstrated transfer, or silence | Unpaid generality checks are a known reject pattern | ## Contribution bullets that survive review Circular bullets ("we propose X, we evaluate X") waste the most-read lines of the paper. Each bullet should assert a falsifiable fact: ```text Weak: - We propose StreamHive, a novel framework for stream anomaly detection. Strong: - We show bounded-memory detection under drift reduces to online decay-rate selection, and give a mixture-of-sketches scheme with O(1) update cost. Weak: - Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Strong: - Across three streams up to 2.1B events, the scheme matches window-retrained deep baselines on AUPRC at fixed 512MB memory; ablations attribute the gain to the drift weighting rather than the ensemble. ``` ## ADS voice The Applied Data Science register differs deliberately from the Research register: - Lead with the business/operational problem and the deployment context, then the technical path — reviewers of ADS papers score problem realism before novelty. - **Lessons learned are content, not filler**: what failed before the shipped design, which offline metrics mispredicted online behavior, what broke at rollout. The classic KDD applied papers are remembered for exactly these sections. - Post-launch numbers must be flagged as such and separated from offline evaluation — the track's desk-reject rule is about quantified post-launch performance, so make those numbers typographically impossible to miss. ## Two-column compression tactics The ACM sigconf format is tight, and submission is 8 content pages: - Write display math sparingly; inline the one-off definitions and reserve display lines for objects the paper reuses. - Every figure earns its column-width: delete any plot whose caption cannot state what decision it supports. Wide tables go `table*` (full width) early, since late layout flips cascade page breaks. - Algorithm environments are expensive; one algorithm block for the core mechanism, prose for variants, full pseudocode in the appendix. - Kill roadmap paragraphs ("Section 2 discusses...") — in an 8-page paper the structure is visible without a tour guide. - The camera-ready adds exactly one content page; do not defer required content to it (reviewers score the submission, and refs+appendix get capped at 3 pages later). ## Anonymity phrasing - Research Track: "our production system at a large e-commerce platform" is fine; naming the company usually is not — and internal system codenames are as identifying as the company name. - Cite your own prior work in third person, and check the referenced repository's README carries no author trace (`kdd-artifact-evaluation`). ## Title and abstract mechanics - KDD titles favor **named-system-plus-claim** (": ") or a direct claim; question titles and pun-only titles underperform with this reviewer pool. - The abstract is bid-bait: reviewers choose papers from it, so the regime vocabulary (graph, stream, drift, recommendation, fraud, spatio-temporal) must appear honestly — the wrong vocabulary buys the wrong experts. - One quantitative claim in the abstract, minimum: an abstract with no number is a style violation at a venue whose currency is measured evidence. ## Revision pass order A concrete sequence for turning a complete draft into a KDD submission, one pass per day in the final week: 1. **Regime pass**: rewrite page one until the data regime leads; fix the abstract's vocabulary and number. 2. **Adjective audit**: grep the draft for "novel", "significantly", "efficient", "large-scale", "real-world"; each occurrence either gains a mechanism/number or dies. ```bash grep -n -iE "novel|significant|efficient|large-scale|real-world|extensive" \ sections/*.tex | wc -l # target: near zero unattached occurrences ``` 3. **Claim-evidence pass**: every contribution bullet cross-referenced to its table, figure, or section; circular bullets rewritten as assertions. 4. **Compression pass**: apply the two-column tactics until the body sits at 8 pages without spacing hacks (`kdd-submission` treats those as desk-level). 5. **Anonymity pass**: self-citations, system codenames, acknowledgements, repo traces — last, so later edits cannot reintroduce leaks. ## Output format ```text [Register diagnosis] regime-first / model-first (needs reframe) / journal-paced [First-page contract] items present: <1-5 checklist> [Adjective audit] [Bullet quality] assertive / circular -> [ADS voice] lessons-learned present / post-launch numbers flagged / N-A [Compression cuts] ```