Scribe Project
Effective Writing

Titles and Abstracts That Work

Writers want their work to be read. A good title and abstract is often the first and only opportunity to catch a potential reader’s attention. Therefore careful attention to the form and content of these two elements is critical to your success as a published author. This set of exercises leads you through several measured efforts to improve an existing title and abstract and then asks you to write these elements for your own project.

Abstract

We seek to gain improved insight into how Web search engines should cope with the evolving Web, in an attempt to provide users with the most up-to-date results possible. For this purpose we collected weekly snapshots of some 150 Web sites over the course of one year, and measured the evolution of content and link structure. Our measurements focus on aspects of potential interest to search engine designers: the evolution of link structure over time, the rate of creation of new pages and new distinct content on the Web, and the rate of change of the content of existing pages under search-centric measures of degree of change. Our findings indicate a rapid turnover rate of Web pages, i.e., high rates of birth and death, coupled with an even higher rate of turnover in the hyperlinks that connect them. For pages that persist over time we found that, perhaps surprisingly, the degree of content shift as measured using TF.IDF cosine distance does not appear to be consistently correlated with the frequency of content updating. Despite this apparent non-correlation, the rate of content shift of a given page is likely to remain consistent over time. That is, pages that change a great deal in one week will likely change by a similarly large degree in the following week. Conversely, pages that experience little change will continue to experience little change. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the potential implications ofour results for the design of effective Web search engines.

Koopman Checklist

For the following exercises we will use Koopman's five parts of an abstract from the linked reference above. For convenience, we list the five parts here. Parts of an Abstract:

  1. Motivation: Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn't obviously "interesting" it might be better to put motivation first; but if your work is incremental progress on a problem that is widely recognized as important, then it is probably better to put the problem statement first to indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on. This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have if successful.
  2. Problem statement: What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a generalized approach, or for a specific situation)? Be careful not to use too much jargon. In some cases it is appropriate to put the problem statement before the motivation, but usually this only works if most readers already understand why the problem is important.
  3. Approach: How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use simulation, analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data for an actual product? What was the extent of your work (did you look at one application program or a hundred programs in twenty different programming languages?) What important variables did you control, ignore, or measure?
  4. Results: What's the answer? Specifically, most good computer architecture papers conclude that something is so many percent faster, cheaper, smaller, or otherwise better than something else. Put the result there, in numbers. Avoid vague, hand-waving results such as "very", "small", or "significant." If you must be vague, you are only given license to do so when you can talk about orders-of-magnitude improvement. There is a tension here in that you should not provide numbers that can be easily misinterpreted, but on the other hand you don't have room for all the caveats.
  5. Conclusions: What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a significant "win", be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road sign indicating that this path is a waste of time (all of the previous results are useful). Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific to a particular case?

Generative AI Tools Guidance

You are permitted and encouraged to use generative AI tools as part of completing this assignment. If you use these tools, make sure of the following:

  • List and acknowledge which tools you used and provide a description of how they were used.
  • Assure that you can take full responsibility for all content. Include only content that you understand and know to be correct.
  • Do not list tools as authors.

Assignment

  1. The title "What's new on the web?: The evolution of the web from a search engine perspective" is catchy but long. Develop one or two titles that retain your interest but are shorter.
  2. The abstract for What's new on the web?: The evolution of the web from a search engine perspective has 249 words (can you guess the imposed limit?). Using the Koopman structure, do the following:
    • Identify the parts (according to Koopman) that are present in this abstract. Use a different color text background to indicate which element each sentence represents.
    • Identify and state which elements are missing (according to Koopman).
    • Add these elements, indicating them with different colored backgrounds.
    • Find the word count and reduce it by 50 words, without losing significant meaning.
    • Reduce it by 50 more words, or even more if possible.
    • Note: Retain each version of the abstract as you perform your iterations.
  3. You have developed a new sorting algorithm for a general list of integers. Your algorithm is O(n)—Wow, you are good! The previous best algorithm is a bubble sort, O(?). Using the same color scheme as in the previous exercise, write a 100 to 200-word abstract for a technical article you will submit for publication.