--- name: cikm-writing-style description: Use when revising a CIKM manuscript for the tri-community readership — writing an opening that lands with IR, data-mining, and knowledge-management reviewers simultaneously, compressing into appendix-inclusive page budgets, keeping claims inside the evidence, and maintaining double-blind and disclosure-compliant prose. --- # CIKM Writing Style A CIKM paper is read in three accents at once. The IR reviewer scans for the task and the evaluation; the mining reviewer scans for the mechanism and its delta; the KM/database reviewer scans for the data reality — schemas, scale, heterogeneity, noise. Style at this venue means making all three scans succeed in the first page, inside a budget where appendices offer no escape (10 pages including them for 2026 full papers). ## The first page, three scans deep Order the opening so each lane hits its anchor early: 1. **The information problem** in domain terms — what is being retrieved, mined, linked, or integrated, and for whom. 2. **Why the boundary is the hard part.** CIKM contributions usually live where lanes meet; say which interaction breaks existing single-lane methods ("KG completion models assume static graphs; enterprise search feeds them a stream"). 3. **The mechanism, named.** One clause a mining reviewer can repeat in their review. 4. **The evidence preview, calibrated.** Datasets, baselines, and the honest size of the win — with the deployment or resource evidence up front if the track demands it. If the paper cannot state point 2, it is a single-lane paper and `cikm-topic-selection` should re-run before more polishing. ## Vocabulary discipline across lanes Cross-community words are where CIKM drafts leak credibility. Terms with lane- specific meanings — *entity*, *knowledge*, *relevance*, *scalable*, *online* — must be pinned at first use. A table of rewrites that recur in CIKM drafts: | Draft habit | Lane it annoys | Repair | |---|---|---| | "our knowledge-aware model" (never defined) | KM-DB | Name the structure: "a model conditioned on a curated product KG (2.1M triples)" | | "significantly better" without a test | IR | Reserve the word for tested significance; else give the margin | | "scales to large graphs" | mining | Give the size, hardware, and growth curve actually measured | | "real-world dataset" | all three | Name the source, size, license, and collection window | | "state-of-the-art baseline" | mining + IR | Cite venue + year; stale SOTA claims are checked at review | ## Budget compression, appendix-inclusive Because appendices count inside the 2026 budgets, the compression question is not "what moves to the appendix" but "what leaves the PDF." Priority order for cuts: redundant pipeline diagrams; per-dataset tables that repeat one pattern (keep the pattern statement plus the fullest table); hyperparameter grids (→ the cited artifact); derivations of standard results (→ cite). What must stay: everything a reviewer needs to *not* trust you — evaluation protocol, baseline tuning parity, and the one ablation that isolates the mechanism. ## Anonymity and disclosure in prose Double-blind style at CIKM includes third-person self-citation ("Cao et al. proposed", even when Cao is an author) and de-identified system prose for applied papers — the deployment must stay describable without becoming attributable. The GenAI Usage Disclosure section is also prose: write it in the same factual register as the experiments ("evaluation scripts drafted with a code assistant, reviewed and tested by the authors; manuscript text human-written"), not as legal boilerplate. ## Section skeleton for a 10-page full paper A load-bearing default under the appendix-inclusive budget (adjust, don't worship): ```text 1.0 pp Introduction — the four-step tri-lane opening 0.75 pp Related work — three fronts + the boundary-work paragraph 2.5 pp Method — problem formulation, mechanism, complexity note 3.0 pp Experiments — protocol ¶, main results, decisive ablation, robustness 0.5 pp Deployment/resource specifics (track-dependent) 0.5 pp Limitations + conclusion 1.75 pp Appendix (counts!) — only review-critical overflow — GenAI Usage Disclosure + references (uncounted) ``` The commonest imbalance in CIKM drafts is a method section eating four-plus pages while the evaluation protocol gets one paragraph; the blended panel reads the protocol paragraph first. ## Title and abstract as routing devices Title and abstract are consumed twice before any human reads page 2: by EasyChair bidding (which lane's reviewers self-select) and later by ACM DL search. A CIKM title should carry the task, the data structure, and — when honest — the setting: "Freshness-Aware Entity Linking for Enterprise Search" routes correctly; "Towards Better Knowledge Utilization" routes randomly. In the abstract, spend one sentence per lane anchor, and put the one number you want remembered in the final sentence — that sentence is what shows in search snippets. ## Micro-rewrite exercise > Draft: "With the explosion of information, knowledge graphs have attracted much > attention. We propose a novel framework, XYZ, which significantly outperforms > state-of-the-art methods." Rewritten for the tri-lane scan: "Product search at catalog scale fails on queries whose intent lives in relations the index never sees — compatibility, succession, bundling. We link the query to a 2.1M-triple product KG at retrieval time and propagate relevance along typed edges; on two public benchmarks and one industrial log this lifts nDCG@10 by 4-6 points over the strongest KG-free ranker, with the gain concentrated exactly on relation-dependent queries." Problem, boundary, mechanism, calibrated evidence — one breath each. ## Limitations without self-sabotage A limitations paragraph that works at CIKM scopes rather than confesses: state the regime the evidence covers (data types, scale, languages, graph density), name the adjacent regime it does not, and say what would be needed to extend — three sentences, no adjectives of apology. The blended panel treats a well-scoped limitation as expertise and an unscoped one ("may not generalize") as either evasion or, worse, an invitation to imagine failures the authors never tested. ## Output format ```text [Three-scan check] IR anchor / mining anchor / KM-DB anchor — found on page 1? [Pinned terms] [Claim-evidence gaps] [Cut list] [Compliance prose] ```