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Scientific Writing for Computer Science Students

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Scientific Writing for Computer
Science Students

Wilhelmiina Hämäläinen

Course material September 20, 2006

Department of Computer Science
University of Joensuu
Preface
This material is originally prepared for IMPIT-students in the Department
of Computer Science, University of Joensuu, to help them when they write
their master’s thesis in English. Since all students are foreigners, quite much
emphasis is put into English grammar, but all examples are taken from the
computer science context. Another emphasis is the use of LATEX, which
suits especially well for writing computer science texts containing several
equations, algorithms, tables, and figures. In addition, the literature sources
and references can be easily managed with bibtex.
The style advice are based on existing literature on scientific writing (e.g.
[1, 2, 4, 3]), but once again the instructions have been applied to the current
customs in the computer science filed.
I wish that the result is useful for the reader!

In Joensuu, 6th Sep 2006,

Wilhelmiina Hämäläinen
Contents

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Goal 1: How to write scientific text is cs? . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1 Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.2 Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.3 Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.4 Writing tree t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.5 Properties of a good tree t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 Goal 2: How to write English? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3 Goal 3: How to write a master’s thesis? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.4 Scientific writing style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4.1 Exact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4.2 Clear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4.3 Compact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4.4 Smooth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4.5 Objective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2 Searching, reading, and referring literature 11

2.1 Need for references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Source types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.3 Collecting literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.4 Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.5.1 Referring in the text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.5.2 Reference notations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.5.3 Reference list . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.5.4 References in latex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.6 Citations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.7 Your own opinions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3
4 CONTENTS

3 Use of tables, figures, examples, and similar elements 23

3.1 Figures and tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.1.1 General rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.1.2 Vector graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.1.3 Captions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.1.4 Tables and figures in latex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.1.5 Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.2 Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.3 Referring to chapters or sections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.4 Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.5 Examples and definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.5.1 Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.5.2 In latex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.5.3 Expressions for referring to a definition . . . . . . . . . 28
3.6 Equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.6.1 Without equation numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.6.2 With equation numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.6.3 Text inside equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

4 Grammar with style notes 31

4.1 Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4.1.1 Number and person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4.1.2 Tenses (temporal forms) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
4.1.3 Active or passive voice, which person? . . . . . . . . . 33
4.1.4 Other notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.1.5 Noun syndrom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
4.1.6 Often needed irregular verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4.2 Nouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.2.1 Plural forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4.2.2 Countable and uncountable nouns . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.2.3 Extra: differences between British and American English 39
4.3 Compound words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.4 Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.4.1 Position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.4.2 Use of articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.4.3 Hints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.5 Pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.5.1 Unclear references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.5.2 Pronouns which require singular verb form . . . . . . . 50
4.5.3 Every vs. all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.5.4 Many vs. several . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
CONTENTS 5

4.5.5 Phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.5.6 Relative pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.5.7 Extra material: Tricks for gender-neutral language . . . 52
4.6 Adjectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
4.6.1 Vague adjecives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
4.6.2 Comparative and superlative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
4.6.3 When you compare things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.7 Adverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4.7.1 The position of adverbs in a sentence . . . . . . . . . . 54
4.7.2 Special cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.7.3 Extra: How to derive adverbs from adjectives? . . . . . 55
4.7.4 Comparing adverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.8 Parallel structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.8.1 Basic rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.8.2 Parallel items combined by conjunctions and, or, but . 58
4.8.3 Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.8.4 Parallel items combined by conjunction pairs . . . . . . 60
4.8.5 The comparative – the comparative . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.8.6 Parallel sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.9 Prepositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.9.1 Expressing location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.9.2 Expressing time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.9.3 Expressing the target or the receiver: to or for? . . . . 63
4.9.4 Special phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.10 Sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.10.1 Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.10.2 Sentence types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.10.3 Sentence length? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
4.10.4 Word order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.10.5 Combining clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
4.10.6 Combining clauses by sub-ordinating conjunctions . . . 70
4.10.7 Relative clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.10.8 Indirect questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.11 Paragraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.11.1 Combining sentences in a paragraph . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.11.2 Dividing a section into paragraphs . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4.11.3 Introductory paragraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.12 Punctuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.12.1 Full-stop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.12.2 Comma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.12.3 Colon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
6 CONTENTS

4.12.4 Dash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.12.5 Semicolon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.12.6 Quotation marks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4.12.7 Parantheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4.13 Genitive: ’s or of? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4.13.1 Special cases where ’s genitive is used for unanimate
things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4.13.2 When of structure is necessary . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4.13.3 Possessive form of pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.14 Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

5 Writing master’s thesis 85

5.1 Parts of the master’s thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.1.1 Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.1.2 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.1.3 Main chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.1.4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.1.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.1.6 Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.1.7 Examples of master’s theses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.2 Master’s thesis process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
5.2.1 Reading literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
5.2.2 Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
5.2.3 Difficulty to get started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
5.2.4 Revising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5.2.5 Technical notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

6 LATEXinstructions and exercises 93

6.1 Why latex? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
6.2 Latex commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
6.3 Basic latex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
6.3.1 Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
6.3.2 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
6.4 Writing equations and special symbols by Latex . . . . . . . . 97
6.5 Writing references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
6.6 Including figures into a latex document . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.7 Drawing figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.7.1 Advices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.7.2 Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
6.8 Spell checking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
6.9 Writing references by bibtex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
CONTENTS 7

6.9.1 Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

6.9.2 Bibtex entries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
6.9.3 Searching bibtex entries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
6.9.4 Exercise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
6.10 Writing algorithms in latex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
6.10.1 Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
6.10.2 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
6.11 Special latex notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
6.11.1 No numbers to sections or sections . . . . . . . . . . . 110
6.11.2 Other symbols or item names to lists . . . . . . . . . . 110
6.11.3 Footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.11.4 Font size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.11.5 Multi-column tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.11.6 Sideway tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6.11.7 Special letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6.11.8 Removing extra spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
6.11.9 Adding extra spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

7 Appendices 115
Appendix A: A simple latex template . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Appendix B: A latex template for articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Appendix C: A check list for the master’s thesis . . . . . . . . . . . 123

References 123
Chapter 1

Introduction

Three learning goals:

1. How to write scientific texts in computer science?

2. How to write in English?

3. How to write a master thesis?

1.1 Goal 1: How to write scientific text is cs?

• general style

• how to use references

• equations, pictures, tables, algorithms

• useful tools (latex, bibtex, picture editors)

1
2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1.1 Problem
Writing w is a mapping from a set of ideas I to a set of scientific
texts S, w : I → S.

Problem: Given a set of ideas i ∈ I, produce f (i) ∈ S

1.1.2 Example

1.1.3 Instructions
1. Organize your ideas in a hierarchical manner, as a tree of ideas t (”mini-
mal spanning tree” of idea graph)

2. Write the tree t as text such that

1.1. GOAL 1: HOW TO WRITE SCIENTIFIC TEXT IS CS? 3

• The root node of t corresponds to your topic (title)

• Its children correspond to chapters

• Their children and grand-children correspond to sections and subsec-

tions

• Leaf nodes correspond to paragraphs (actual text)

1.1.4 Writing tree t

Each node n ∈ t contains three fields:

• title(n): the main title or the name of the chapter, section or subsec-
tion. In leaf nodes (paragraphs) N U LL

• children(n): n’s children (chapters, sections or subsections). In leaf

node N U LL.

• content(n): description of the idea in n. In non-leaf nodes very brief,

in leaf nodes longer.

The following algorithm descibes how to walk through t in preorder and write
it as a sequence s ∈ S (scientific text):

1.1.5 Properties of a good tree t

• t is balanced: all paths from the root to a leaf are approximately of
equal length, usually ≤ 4 or at most ≤ 5.

• Each node in t has a reasonable number of children k: k ≤ 2 and

typically k ≤ 7 (in maximum k = 10)

• For all leaf nodes n, the sizes of content(n) are balanced: each para-
graph contains at least two sentences, but is not too long (e.g. ≤ 7 or
≤ 10 sentences)

• For all non-leaf nodes m, the sizes of content(m) are balanced. These
introductory paragraphs can be very brief. They just give an overview
what will be covered in that chapter or section. Exceptionally you can
use more than one paragraph. Notice that it is possible to skip them
totally, but be systematic!
4 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

Alg. 1 WriteTree(t)
Input: tree of ideas t
Output: scientific text s

1 begin
2 Write title(n)
3 if (n is not leaf node)
4 begin
Writing an introductory paragraph:
5 Write content(n)
6 for all u = child(n)
7 Write title(u)
8 for all u = child(n)
9 WriteTree(u)
10 end
11 else
Writing a main paragrap:
12 Write content(n)
13 end

• For all leaf nodes ni in preorder, content(ni ) can refer only to previously
written contents content(n1 ), ..., content(ni−1 ). E.g. you cannot define
deterministic automaton as an opposite of non-deterministic automa-
ton, if you haven’t given the definition of non-deterministic automaton,
yet. Exception: you can briefly advertise what will be described in the
future. E.g. ”This problem is solved in Chapter X”.

1.2 Goal 2: How to write English?

Every week we will spend some time with English grammar and expressions.

We will practice at least the following topics:

• dividing the text into paragraphs, sentences and clauses

• possessive case (expressing the owner)

• verb tense and number

1.3. GOAL 3: HOW TO WRITE A MASTER’S THESIS? 5

• word order in sentences

• use of articles
• punctuation
• useful words and expressions
Other important topics??

Idea: personally selected exercises!

1.3 Goal 3: How to write a master’s thesis?

Writing a master’s thesis is not just writing, but you have to read a lot of
material, make experiments, and analyze the results.

The process has the same phases as a software project or any problem solving
activity:
1. Defining the problem: Discuss with your supervisor and define what
is the problem. Try to understand it in a larger context: other related
problems and subproblems. Read some introductory article about the
topic or select the main books written about your topic. You can
already generate several ideas how to solve it, but don’t fix anything,
yet.
2. Specification: Specify your topic carefully. Don’t take too large topic!
Invent a preliminary title for your thesis and define the content in a
coarse level (main chapters). Ask your supervisor’s approval! Decide
with your supervisor what material you should read or what experi-
ments to make.
3. Design: Define the content more carefully: all sections and a brief de-
scription what you will write in each of them. Define the main concepts
you will need and fix the notations. Then you can write the chapters
in any order you want. Make also a work plan: what you will do and
when.
4. Implementation: You can write the thesis after you have read all
material or made all experiments. However, you can begin to write
some parts already when you are working. Often you have to change
your design plan, but it is just life! Ask feedback from your supervisor,
when your work proceeds.
6 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

5. Final work: Check language and spelling, missing or incomplete ref-

erences. Check that the structure is coherent. Write an abstract.

Note: In practice it is easier to write other chapters, if you have an intro-

duction, which defines the problem. However, often you have to write the
introduction again in the end, when everything else is ready. Conclusions are
also written in the end.

1.4 Scientific writing style

Main goal: exact, clear, and compact.
• Compact is usally clear!

• Other desirable properties: smooth and objective

1.4.1 Exact
• Word choice: make certain that every word means exactly what you
want to express. Choose synonyms with care. Be not afraid of repeti-
tion.

• Avoid vague expressions which are typical for the spoken language.
E.g. the interpretation of words which approximate quantities (”quite
large”, ”practically all”, ”very few”) depends on the reader and the
context. Avoid them especially if you describe empirical observations.

• Make clear what the pronouns refer to. The reader shouldn’t have to
search the previous text to determine their meaning. Simple pronouns
like this, that, these, those are often the most probematic, especially
when they refer to the previous sentence. Hint: mention the noun, e.g.
”this test”.
→ See Section 4.5 Pronouns.

• Avoid ambiguous and illogical comparisons. These are often due to

missing words or nonparallel structures. E.g. ”Female students draw
concept maps more often than male students.”
”The students’ points were lower than the average computer science
students.”

→ See Section 4.8 Parallel constructions.

1.4. SCIENTIFIC WRITING STYLE 7

• Antropomorfism: do not attribute human characteristics to machines

or other inanimate things. E.g. a computer cannot undertand data, an
experiment cannot control variables or interpret findings, a table or a
figure cannot compare results.

• Incorrect grammar and careless sentence structures can create ambigu-

ities!

1.4.2 Clear
• Use illustrative titles which describe the essential in a chapter or a
section.

• Write a brief introductory paragraph in the beginning of each chapter

or section with subsections.

• Divide the text logically into sentences and paragraphs.

– Direct, declarative sentences with simple, common words are usu-

ally best.
– Paragraphs should be logically uniform and continuous.

→ See Section Sentences

• Place the adjective or the adverb as close as possible to the word it

modifies.
→ See Sections Adverbs and Word order.

• Avoid scientific jargon = continuous use of technical vocabulary when

it is not relevant.

• Write numbers as digits when they refer to sizes or exact measurements.

Otherwise the general rule is to write numbers < 10 as words. Express
decimal numbers with a suitable precision. See APA pp. 122-129.

• Use punctutation to support meaning.

→ See Section 4.12 Punctuation and [3][78-88].

1.4.3 Compact
• Say only what needs to be said!

• Short words and short sentences are always easier to comprehend

8 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

• Weed out too detailed descriptions. E.g. when you describe previous
work, avoid unnnecessary details. Give a reference to a general survey
or a review if available.

• Don’t describe irrelevant or trivial observations (i.e. don’t mention ob-

vious things)

• Avoid wordiness, e.g.

”based on the fact that” → ”because”

”at the present time” → ”now”
”for the purpose of ” → ”for/to sg.”

Notice: ”reason” and ”because” have the same meaning → don’t use
together!

• Use no more words than are necessary. Redundant words and phrases
(which have no new information) should be omitted.

• Avoid too long sentences and paragraphs

1.4.4 Smooth
• Verbs: Stay within the chosen tense! No unnecessary shifts in verb
tense within

– the same paragraph

– in adjacent paragraphs

→ See Section 4.1 Verbs.

• Use verbs rather than their noun equivalents

• Prefer active to passive voice

• Avoid long noun strings!

Hint: sometimes you can move the last word to the beginning and fill
in with verbs and prepositions

• Each pronoun should agree with the referant in number and gender.

• Transitional words help to maintain the flow of thought

1.4. SCIENTIFIC WRITING STYLE 9

– time links: then, next, after, while, since

– cause-effect links: therefore, consequently, as a result
– addition links: in addition, moreover, furthermore, similarly
– contrast links: but, however, although, whereas

• Notice: some transitional words (while, since) can be used in several

meanings → limit their use to their temporal meaning! (Use ”because”
instead of ”since”; ”although”, ”whereas” or ”but” instead of ”while”,
when there is no time connection.)

• Use abbreviations sparingly, especially the abbreviations which you de-

fine yourself for technical terms.
→ See Section 4.14 Abbreviations.

• Do not use emphasis (italics) when it is not needed. Use syntax to

provide emphasis.

• Metaphors can sometimes help to simplify complex ideas. However,

– Don’t overuse them

– Don’t mix several metaphors in one sentence
– Avoid cliches

1.4.5 Objective
• Use the 3rd person rather than the 1st person.

• Use emotionally neutral expressions, e.g. ”Students suffering from dyslexia”

→ ”students who have dyslexia”

• Use words which are free from bias (implied or irrelevant evaluation)
Especially, be careful when you talk about

– gender
– marital status
– racial or ethnical groups
– disability
– age

→ See Subsection 4.5.7 Tricks for gender-neutral language.

10 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

Hints:
• Select an appropriate degree of specifity. When in doubt, prefer the
more specific expression. E.g.

– Instead of ”man” use ”men and women” or ”women and men” to

refer to all human beings
– Instead of ”old people” define the age group ”ages 65-83”
– Instead of ”Asian” mention the nationality ”Chinese”

• Differences should be mentioned only when relevant. Careless use of

biassed words can create ambiguities.
E.g. avoid the use of ”man” as a generic noun or an ending for an
occupational title. Otherwise it can imply incorrectly that all people
in the group are male.
Chapter 2

Searching, reading, and

referring literature

2.1 Need for references

In scientific writing, we use a lot of references!

• All text must be justified, either based on previous research or your

own results.

• It must be clear what the information is based on!

• Often the whole master thesis is based on systematic study of existing

literature. The information is just analyzed and organized from a new
point of view.

• The sources for scientific writing must also be scientific!

2.2 Source types

The literature sources can be divided into three groups:

1. Primary sources: articles in conferences and journals

• original sources
• the papers should have appeared in a reviewed journal/conference
(i.e. reviewers have checked their correctness!)
• also technical reports and other theses

11
12CHAPTER 2. SEARCHING, READING, AND REFERRING LITERATURE

2. Secundary sources: textbooks, encyclopedias, glossaries

• sometimes useful analysis or interpretation, but not original sources

• you can use these in master thesis, but only as supplementary
material
• often contain useful literature hints (usually under section ”Bibli-
ographical notes” etc.)

3. Bibliographies

• support information retrieval

• lists of articles + references
• scientific search engines are on-line bibliographies

Task: Can you trust the information you find in wikipedia? Why or why
not? Why wikipedia cannot be used as a reference in a scientific text?

2.3 Collecting literature

Starting point: your preliminary topic.

• goal

• central concepts, theories and themes

How to proceed?
• Begin from familiar: notes, textbooks

• Ask your supervisor

• Check references in useful papers or books

• Make key word queries in scientific bibliographies or electronic libraries

(good sources for cs are ACM, IEEE, Elsevier, Springer)

• If you make an internet query, prefer scholar google. Check always that
the paper has been published!

• Write down the references – they can be hard to find afterwards! (es-
pecially store the bibtex files)
2.4. READING 13

Tasks
• Practise to use the most important digital libraries for cs: ACM, IEEE,
and Springer (also series Lecture Notes in Computer Science). Try to
find at least one article in each library about Bayesian networks.

• You know only the author and article name, but not any publication
details. How can you find the article?

• Try to find the following articles and write full references (authors, title,
page numbers, where published, publisher, year):

– Cover and Van Campenhout: On the possible orderings in the

measurement selection problem.
– ”T. Winters and T. Payne: What do students know? An outcomes-
based assessment system.
– Dash and Cooper: Model Averaging for Prediction with Discrete
Bayesian Networks.
– Aggarwal et al.: On the surprising behavior of distance metrics in
high dimensional space, LNCS 1973.
– A.K. Dey and G.D. Abowd: Towards a better understanding of
context and context-awareness.
– B. du Boulay: Can We Learn from ITSs?

2.4 Reading
• You cannot read everything throughout!
⇒ Read only as much as is needed to

– recognize that the article is useless

– get the useful information

• Often an iterative process: important articles are read several times!

– Title and abstract

– Scan through introduction and conclusions/summary
– Check references: new good references?
– Important or useful sections and subsections (the organization is
usually described in the introduction)
14CHAPTER 2. SEARCHING, READING, AND REFERRING LITERATURE

– In the beginning, don’t get stuck in details; don’t check individual

words or references; believe the arguments
– If the article is important, then try to understand it properly, and
check the referred sources

• Ask yourself:

– What is the main idea?

– What is the contribution (the new or interesting thing)?
– What is important for you? Where it is presented?

• If you don’t understand the article

– Try to invent examples or simulate the solution yourself

– Ask your fellows, supervisor, experts
– Ask (yourself and others) specified questions: Where this equation
comes from?, What is the relationship between these algorithms?
Can you give an example for this definition?
– Often understanding happens as a background process!

2.5 References
2.5.1 Referring in the text
• The reference is usually immediately after the referred theory, algo-
rithm, author, etc.

”According to Dijkstra [Dij68] goto statement should be avoided...”

”Bloom filters [Ref03] solve this problem...”

• The reference is in the end, if you refer to the whole sentence or a

paragraph. (before full stop, if it refers only to the previous sentence,
otherwise after the full stop)

”Goto statement should be avoided [Dij68].” Notice the difference: now

you agree with Dijkstra!
2.5. REFERENCES 15

• Sometimes there is no one ”original” source, but a new concept or the-

ory has developed little by little. In this case, you can give a couple of
example references where the reader can find more infromation.

”Context-aware computing (see e.g. [DeA99,CaK00]) is a new approach...”

Other examples

”Minsky and Papert [MiP69] showed that...”

”Version spaces were introduced by Mitchell [Mit77].”

”Nonparametric methods are described by Randles and Wolfe [RaW79].”

”The principles of CART were first described in Breiman et al. [BrF84].” or

”The principles of CART were first described in [BrF84].”

”Prolog was primarly used for writing compilers [VRo90] and parsing natural
language [PeW80].”

”The general procedure for skolemization is given by Skolem [Sko28].”

”Other methods are summarized in e.g. [Bro92,Woo96].”

”The problem is N P -complete [Coo00].

2.5.2 Reference notations

• A common style: three letters from the authors’ names + the last
numbers from the year. E.g. [Ham06]

• Sometimes numbers

• A humanist style: surname + year. E.g. [Hämäläinen, 2006]

Notes

• If you refer to a book, give the chapter or the page numbers!

16CHAPTER 2. SEARCHING, READING, AND REFERRING LITERATURE

• If you use only one chapter from a book, you can give the chapter
number and title in the reference list. If you use several chapters, give
the chapter number in the reference: [WMB94, chapter 2]

• The page number is always given in the text ”[Bro92,pp.3-7]”

• If you have several references, list them together: [Bro92,Woo96]

2.5.3 Reference list

The last chapter in your thesis (or section in a paper) is called References.
For each source, give

• The authors: surname and the first letters of the first names. If you
have ≥ 3 authors, give only the first one, and replace the others by ”et
al.” E.g. ”Mitchell, T.M. et al.”

• The title

• Publisher, (place) and year.

• Page numbers, if the source is a paper or a chapter in a collection

written by several people.

• The title and the editors of the collection, if the paper has appeared in
a collection (e.g. conference articles).

• The volume (always!) and the issue number after a comma or in paran-
theses, if the source is a journal paper.

• Series, if the book has appeared in some series. (E.g. Lecture Notes in
Computer Science + number)

Journal and conference articles

Most of your references should belong to these groups!

1. A journal article:
<Authors>: <Title>. <Journal>, <volume> (<issue>): <pages>,
<year>.

2. A conference article:
<Authors>: <Title>. In <book title>, <pages>, <year>.
2.5. REFERENCES 17

Examples:

A journal article:

Cheng, V., Li, C.H., Kwok, J.T. and Li, C.-K.: Dissimilarity learning for
nominal data. Pattern Recognition, 37(7):1471–1477, 2004.

A conference article:

Salazar-Afanador, A., Gosalbez-Castillo, J., Bosch-Roig, I., Miralles-Ricos,

R. and Vergara-Dominguez, L.: A case study of knowledge discovery on aca-
demic achievement, student desertion and student retention. In Proceedings
of the 2nd International Conference on Information Technology: Research
and Education (ITRE 2004), pages 150–154, 2004.

Note 1: In the previous, you could replace the last authors by <First author>
et al.

Note 2: Sometimes a comma or a full stop is used instead of the colon ”:”.

Books
1. A book:
<Authors>: < Title>. < Publisher>, < year>.
2. An article in a collection:
<Authors>: < Title>. In <Editors>, editors, <Book title>.
< Publisher>, < year>.
3. A chapter in a book (by one author):
<Authors>: < Title>, <Book title>, chapter < chapter number>.
< Publisher>, < year>.
Examples:

Lord, F.M.: Applications of item response theory to practical testing prob-

lems. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980.

D.W. Scott and S.R Sain: Multi-dimensional density estimation. In C.R.

Rao and E.J. Wegman, editors, Handbook of Statistics—Vol 23: Data Min-
ing and Computational Statistics. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2004.
18CHAPTER 2. SEARCHING, READING, AND REFERRING LITERATURE

Smyth, P.: Data mining at the interface of computer science and statistics,
volume 2 of Massive Computing, chapter 3. Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Norwell, MA, USA, 2001.

Technical reports and theses

Use technical reports and master theses only exceptionally. They have not
been reviewed (or at least not as well as real publications)! The doctoral
theses have uaually gone trhough a careful review.

1. A technical report:
<Authors>: < Title>. <Report series> <report number>, <Institution>,
<year>.

2. A master thesis:
<Author>: < Title>. Master’s thesis, <Department>, <University
or institution>, <year>.

Examples:

Dey, A.K. and Abowd, G.D.: Towards a better understanding of context

and context-awareness. GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-99-22, College of
Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1999.

Norris, A.: Multivariate analysis and reverse engineering of signal transduc-

tion pathways. Master’s thesis, Department of Mathematics, Institute of
Applied Mathematics, University of British Columbia, 2002.

Referring to internet articles

Be default, all sources should have been published! Refer to internet

articles only if they have been published in an internet journal! Other
papers can be referred only for a good reason (i.e. if the information
is not available elsewehere).

• If you refer to an article, which is available in the internet but has been
published in a paper form, give the normal reference to the paper
version. The url address is not necessary, but it can be given to help
the reader to find the article.
2.5. REFERENCES 19

• If an article has been published only in an internet journal, give

the reference like to any common journal article, but replace the page
numbers by the url address.
• If the article exists only in the internet but is not published, give
the retrieval date and the url address in the end of reference. E.g. ”Re-
trieved March 3, 2006, from http:www.kissastan.edu/bnetworks/
bnarticle.html.
• If you refer to an internet textbook, give the normal book informa-
tion if possible (Author, book title, publisher, year). Sometimes the
internet book have also a publisher like a company, institution, etc.).
If it doesn’t have any publication year, then give the date when the
book was accessed by you. Always give the url address.
Examples:

An unpublished internet source:

Fox, E.: Details of clustering algorithms (lecture notes).

http://maya.cs.depaul.edu/ classes/ds575/clustering/CL-alg-details.html, 1995-
1996.

An internet textbook (a special case, no author is mentioned, only the com-

pany – Xycoon – which has produced the book.)

Xycoon: Linear Regression Techniques (Online Econometrics Textbook),

chapter II. Office for Research Development and Education, 2000-2006.

Referring to software
• Standard software tools and programming languages like LATEX,
Matlab, and Java do not need any references.
• If you use special tools or programs with limited distribution it is
recommendable to give the reference. E.g.

BCAT [A Bayesian network tool]. Retrieved March 3, 2006, from http:

www.kissastan.edu/bcat-tool/bcat3.0.html.
• If you know the organization which has produced the work, give it in
the publisher position (before retrieval information). If somebody has
rights to the software, mention her/him as the author.
20CHAPTER 2. SEARCHING, READING, AND REFERRING LITERATURE

Examples:

Bourne, S. The UNIX System. International Computer Science Series, Addison-

Wesley, 1982. (a book)

Gannon, D. et al. Programming environments for parallel algorithms. In

Parallel & Distributed Algorithms, ed. M. Cosnard et al. North-Holland,
1989. 101-108. (an article in a collection)

Grahne, G., Nykänen, M., Ukkonen, E. Reasoning about strings in databases.

Journal of Computer and System Sciences 59, 1 (1999), 116-162. (an article
in a journal)

• More examples in the exercises!

• Notice that the journal and book titles are written with capital letters!

2.5.4 References in latex

• Latex creates the notations automatically!

• You can select the style by setting the style parameter for the bibliog-
raphy environment

• Just invent a unique label string for each source, which you use in
references by command \cite. E.g. \cite{whamalai}, or if you want
to refer page 3, \cite[3]{whamalai}

• In the References, define what the label refers

• If you have alot of sources, you can manage them automatically by

bibtex (we will return to bibtex later in this course)

We will practise these in the computer class!

2.6 Citations
Direct citations are seldom used in cs texts.

If you use them, make clear who is responsible for what!

2.7. YOUR OWN OPINIONS? 21

• If you express somebody else’s ideas by your own words, then put the
reference immediately after the idea.

• If you express somebody’s ideas by her/his own words, then it is a

citation!

• If quotation marks ”...” are missing, it is called plagiarism!

• As a rule of thumb: if you borrow more than 7 words, then use quota-
tion marks.

• If the citation is translated, then mention also the translator in refer-

ence.

• If you add or dropp words, show it by [] or ....

• If you emphasize words, mention it.

• An example:

Nykänen [Nyk03] remarks that unreferred citation is plagiarism (trans-

lation and emphasis by the author): ”If you borrow more than seven
words ... from a text it [borrowing] is called literary theft.”

2.7 Your own opinions?

By default: no opinions, everything must be based on facts!

If you have to express your own opinions, then

• In principle, everything without references is your own interpretation.

• However, make clear, what is borrowed and what are your own opinions!

• Often clearer to write a separate section called ”Discussion”.

22CHAPTER 2. SEARCHING, READING, AND REFERRING LITERATURE
Chapter 3

Use of tables, figures,

examples, and similar elements

3.1 Figures and tables

3.1.1 General rules
• Notice: all graphs, pictures or drawings are called figures.
• Figures illustrate the models or the results, and tables give summaries.
Usually there are never too many figures and tables, but remember two
rules

1. All figures and tables must be referred in the text.

2. There is no sense to express trivial things as a figure or a table
(e.g. a table, which contains only two lines).

• If there is no need to refer to a figure/table in the text, the figure/table

is probably not needed!
• Avoid repeating the same data in several places. An informative table
or figure supplements rather than duplicates the text. Refer to all
tables/figures, and tell the reader what to look for.
• Discuss only the most important items of the table in the text.
• A figure should be easy to understand. Do not present any unnecessary
details.
• If two tables/figures should be compared, position them next to each
other.

23
24CHAPTER 3. USE OF TABLES, FIGURES, EXAMPLES, AND SIMILAR ELEMENTS

3.1.2 Vector graphics

Draw the figures by a tool which uses vector graphics, not raster graphic
(bitmaps)! There is a big difference in quality:

w(j − j 0 ) + w − 1 w(j − j 0 ) − w + 1

w
Di−1,j 0
w
Di,j

α+1

(The bitmap file was also about 30 times larger!)

3.1.3 Captions
• Each table or figure should be understandable by its own. Give a brief
but clear explanation or a title in the caption.

• Explain all special abbreviations, symbols, special use of underlinings,

dashes, parantehses, etc.

• Use the same style in all tables. If you use abbreviation stdev for
standard deviation in one table, then do not use sd in another table.

• If you copy (draw again) a table or a figure from some other source,
then give a reference to the original source in the end of caption, e.g.
”Table 5. Plaa-plaa-plaa. Note. From [ref ].”
A page number is needed, if the table or figure is from a book.

3.1.4 Tables and figures in latex

• Notice: Refer to tables and figures by numbers. Do not write ”the table
below”. In latex this is implemented by using labels
3.2. LISTS 25

• The tables are encapsulated between \begin{table}and \end{table}commands.

Similarly, the figures are encapsulated between \begin{figure}and
\end{figure}commands.

• Inside table or figure environment you can write the caption for the
figure/table, and define a label (after the caption).

3.1.5 Expressions
When you refer to figures and tables you can use the following expressions:

• The results are summarized/reported in Table 1

• The results are represented in

• Figure 2 illustrates

• In the Figure we observe

• The model is given in Figure 7

• etc.

Notice the capital letters!

3.2 Lists
• Lists are not separate objects, and they are introduced in the text.

• Use list only when they are necessary! E.g.

”The main criteria of X are (the following):”

– Criterion 1
– Criterion 2
– ...

Or ”The method consists of five steps:” + a list

• If you list only a couple of items, you can usually write them without
a list. Use lists when the clarify things!
26CHAPTER 3. USE OF TABLES, FIGURES, EXAMPLES, AND SIMILAR ELEMENTS

3.3 Referring to chapters or sections

• The following chapters and sections can be referred easily in latex, even
if you don’t know there numbers yet.

• You just have to define a unique label name for the referred chapter.

• In the beginning of the referred chapter, you write

\chapter{Conclusions}
\label{concl}

And when you want to refer it you write

”The final conclusions are drawn in Chapter \ref{concl}

• Notice that you can invent the labels yourself, if they are just unique
and not reserved words in latex. E.g. above label could be simply ”c”,
but now there is a danger that you will give the same name for another
object.

Useful expressions when you refer to chapters or sec-

tions
• The problem is discussed in Chapter X

• We will return to this topic in Section Y

• This problem is analyzed in ...

• etc.

Notice the capital letters!

3.4 Algorithms
• Give only the main algorithms in the text, and in an appropriate ab-
straction level (pseudocode)

• Fix the pseudocode notation and use it systematically

3.5. EXAMPLES AND DEFINITIONS 27

• Simple methods can be described by a numerated list of steps

• Logical and set operations are often useful when you describe algo-
rithms in an abstract level (for all xi ∈ X, T = T ∪ {pi }, find such
S ( T that q(S),...)
• If you writer longer algorithms, insert them into a figure or an environ-
ment of their own. Now they can be referred like tables and figures:
”The EM algorithm for probabilistic clustering in given in Alg. 1”
• Later in this course, we will introduce a latex environment for writing
algorithms.

3.5 Examples and definitions

3.5.1 Definition
A good definition

• explains the defined concept.

• is not a circular argument (where x is defined by y and y by x).
• is not expressed by negative terms, if possible. (Sometimes you cannot
avoid this. E.g. statistical dependency is defined by statistical indepen-
dency, because independency can be defined unambiguously.)
• doesn’t contain unclear, vague, or descriptive language (i.e. is exact).
• defines only what is needed (i.e. the scope is restricted).

3.5.2 In latex
In latex, you can easily define environments for writing examples or defini-
tions in a systematic way. The examples or definitions are numbered auto-
matically and you can refer to them without knowing the actual number.
In the header you define \newtheorem{example}{Example}
In text you write
”The problem is demonstrated in the following example:”

\begin{example}
\label{example:bayes}
Write the example here.
\end{example}
28CHAPTER 3. USE OF TABLES, FIGURES, EXAMPLES, AND SIMILAR ELEMENTS

When you want to refer to the example afterwards, you can write
”Let the problem be the same as in Example \ref{example:bayes},...’’

3.5.3 Expressions for referring to a definition

• The definition of ... is the following:

• The definition of ... is as follows:

• Formally, we define

3.6 Equations
3.6.1 Without equation numbers
If you don’t need equation numbers, you can write the equations simply
between double $ characters: $$<equation>$$.
E.g. ”The prior probability of X is updated by Bayes rule, given new evidence
Y:

P (X)P (Y |X)
P (X|Y ) .
P (Y )
Remember the full stop in the end of the equaton, if the sentence finishes!
If the sentence continues, then you need comma:
”The dependency is described by equation

< equation >,

where a is sg. and b is sg.”

3.6.2 With equation numbers

If you want to give an equation a reference number, you have to use com-
mands \begin{equation}and \end{equation}.

P (X)P (Y |X)
P (X|Y ) (3.1)
P (Y )
Now the equation is written in the math mode, and you don’t need $ char-
acters.
If you want to refer to some previous equation, you have to give it a label
like for examples.
3.6. EQUATIONS 29

3.6.3 Text inside equations

Often you need also text inside an equation. To write text, you have to
change to the text mode by \textrm{text}command.
For example, writing

$$A=\{(x,y)~|~x \in X, y \in Y \textrm{ and for all even } x, y

\textrm{ is odd}\}$$

produces the following:

A = {(x, y) | x ∈ X, y ∈ Y and for all even x, y is odd}

30CHAPTER 3. USE OF TABLES, FIGURES, EXAMPLES, AND SIMILAR ELEMENTS
Chapter 4

Grammar with style notes

Verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, and adjectives compose the sceleton of

sentences. The additional stuff consists of

• adverbs,

• prepositions, and

• conjunctions.

Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs, while conjunctions join

words, clauses or sentences together. Some words can be used either as
adverbs or as conjunctions. Prepositions are always connected to other words
(nouns, pronouns, or verbs in -ing form). Prepositional phrases (”in the
beginning”, ”through a gateway”) are used in the same way as adverbs.

4.1 Verbs
Remember two important rules when you use verbs:

1. The number of subject determines the number of verb

2. Do not mix inconsistent tenses

4.1.1 Number and person

• When the subject is singular third person (she/he/it), the verb needs
suffix -s (in the present, positive sentence). The auxiliary verbs have
their own special forms (is, can, has, does).

31
32 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

• Be careful with special phrases:

”A number of new experiments were done” (plural)
”Plenty of time was spent...” (singular)
”A few data points belong to cluster X” (plural)

• Notice: when the subject is composed of a singular and a plural noun

by ”or” or ”nor”, the verb agrees with the noun that is closer.

• If the number of the subject changes, retain the verb in each clause.
E.g. ”The positions in a sequence were changed and the test rerun” →
”The positions in the sequence were changed, and the test was rerun.”

4.1.2 Tenses (temporal forms)

• Default: the present

• Past or present prefect (but not both) when you describe pre-
vious research (literature review)

• Past tense to describe the experiments and their results

• In scientific writing, the default is present (is). With present, you can
combine perfect (has been) (and future, will be) if needed, but not the
other tenses.

• Use past tense (was) only for good reasons. It expresses that something
belongs to the past and has already finished. E.g. when you report your
experiments.

• Past perfect (had been) is seldom needed. It is used, when you de-
scribe something in the past tense, and you refer to something which
has happened before it. E.g.
”We tested the system with data which had been collected in Program-
ming 1 course.”

• Notice: Use ”would” with care! It expresses a conditional action. E.g.

”it would appear” → ”it appears”.
4.1. VERBS 33

4.1.3 Active or passive voice, which person?

Use of passive voice
• In active voice the actor is known, while in passive voice it is unknown.

• In the basic form of passive (”sg is done”), you can express also the actor
(”sg is done by sy”). Expressing the actor is always more informative!

• It is often recommended to prefer active voice, but in scientific writ-

ing passive voice is sometimes convenient. It allows us to draw the
reader’s attention to the phenomenon or the event, instead of the ac-
tor. E.g. ”The probabilities are updated by Bayes rule”, ”The values
are recorded every minute”, ”The score is assessed on the basis of the
training data.”.

• Often the purpose determines the voice. Usually we want to begin with
a familiar word and put the new information in the end. E.g. before an
equation or a definition, we can say ”The model is defined as follows.”.

• However, do not overuse passive, and do not chain passive expressions.

As a rule of thumb, use only one passive per sentence

• Read Section 11 in Strunk: ”Elements of style”! (link in the course

page)

”It is” and ”There is/are”

• A formal subject ”it” is sometimes used in passive expressions: ”It is
often recommended [reference] that...”

• Typical verbs in this expression are: say, suppose, consider, expect.

• ”There is/there are” is a similar expression, but now we don’t need the
passive. This expression is used when the real subject (what is some-
where) comes later and we haven’t mentioned it before.

E.g. ”There was only one outlier in the data set 1” v.s. ”The outlier
was in the data set 1.”

• The verb is nearly always ”be” (sometimes ”exist” or something else)

• Notice that the verb follows the real subject’s number.

E.g. ”There were a lot of outliers in the data set 1.”
34 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

• ”There is” expression is seldom needed in scientific writing, and often

you can circumvent it:
”The data set 1 contained a lot of outliers.”

Other passive expressions

• ”We” can be used as passive. E.g. ”In Chapter X, we define the basic
concepts.” However, it is better to say ”The basic concepts are defined
in Chapter X.”

• ”You” is sometimes used as passive, especially in manuals. Don’t use

it in scientific text!

• ”People” when you refer generally to people. Quite a vague expression,

not recommendable!

Person?
• Basic rule: avoid the first person (no opinions, but facts). However,
sometimes we can use ”we” as a passive expression. Problem: whom
you are referring to, if you write alone?

• Referring to yourself: you can talk about ”the author”. E.g. ”All pro-
grams have been implemented by the author.” Notice that I don’t
guarantee that your supervisor likes this! Some supervisors prefer ”I”.

• Gender-neutral language: when you refer to an unknown user, student,

etc. try to use gender-neutral language.

– The most common way is to say ”she/he” or ”he or she”. Some

authors are careful about the order of her/him, as well! E.g. you
can use every second time ”she or he” and every second time ”he
or she”. Remember to put the other pronouns in the same order
(”She/he tries her/his best”)
– ”One” is neutral, but sounds often awkward. ”The learner can
define one’s own learning goals”
– Sometimes you can avoid the problem by using plural.

4.1.4 Other notes

• Do not use short forms ”isn’t, can’t, doesn’t”, but ”is it, cannot, does
not”.
4.1. VERBS 35

• ”be verb+ing” form when something is currently happening or takes

some time. E.g. ”Thread 2 can be started in the same time when thread
1 is still running”

• Some verbs require that the following verb is in -ing form:

{enjoy, avoid, succeed in, finish, keep, mind, practice, risk, continue}
+ verb + ing

E.g. ”Students enjoyed learning new things”

”Continue splitting until criterion X has been reached.”

• Similarly some phrases: ”it is worth remarking that...”

• Special phrases: ”be used to”, ”be (un)likely to”

4.1.5 Noun syndrom

”Noun syndrom” = use of common verbs {be, do, have, make, ...} + a noun

E.g. ”We can get better understanding...”,”Different people have different

responses to the methods”
⇒ Prefer illustrative verbs!

Task: How would you correct the previous sentences?

Useful verbs:
represent, analyze, apply, compare, demonstrate, illustrate, summarize, op-
timize, minimize, maximize, conclude, list, define, report, model, implement,
design, consider, involve, simplify, generalize, perform, reduce, obey, fit, con-
tain, consists of, scale up to, be based on sg., take into account sg., depend
on sg, increase, decrease, evaluate, predict, assign, require, satisfy, ...

Examples:
”As k increases, the model allows for quite flexible functional forms.”
”Data obeys the assumed functional form.”
”Data increases exponentially with dimensionality.”
”We will discuss examples of each of these approaches.”
36 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

Task: What is the difference between the following concepts? Give examples
when they are used!

evaluate – assess
compute – calculate
derive – infer
approximate – estimate
discover – find

4.1.6 Often needed irregular verbs

The following list contains irregular verbs which are sometimes needed in
computer science expressions, excluding the most common ones (which all of
you know!):

choose – chose – chosen

find – found – found
hide – hid – hidden
hold – held – held
lead – led – led
lose – lost – lost
rise – rose – risen
seek – sought – sought
show – showed – shown
spin – spun – spun
split – split – split
spread – spread – spread
stick – stuck – stuck

In addition, the last consonant can be doubled before -ed, if

• if the spell is short and stressed: planned, dropped,

• the consonant is ’l’: travelled, modelled, biassed

Notice: American English is not so strict, and ispell can complain about
correct spelling!
4.2. NOUNS 37

Exercise

Read the given text part and underline useful expressions. Search especially
the following kind of expressions:

• Useful verbs and their prepositions in computer science texts.

• How to list advantages or disadvantages without repetition (usually in

the beginning of sentences).

• How to compare approaches?

• Any other useful expressions!

The same text is given to two people. Thus, you can discuss with your pair,
if you don’t understand something. However, it is not important if you don’t
understand all words.

4.2 Nouns

Nouns are usually easy. If you don’t know a word, you can check it from a
dictionary – just be careful that the meaning is what you want.

Often a better way is to move a term from your passive vocabulary to the
active one – then you known also the use context!
38 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.2.1 Plural forms

Irregular plural forms
half – halves
life – lives
axis – axes
matrix – matrices
child – children
person – people
automaton – automata
vertex – vertices
index – indices (or indexes)
appendix – appendices (or appendixes)
analysis – analyses
thesis – theses
paranthesis – parantheses
basis – bases
emphasis – emphases
series – series
medium – media
criterion – criteria
phenomenon – phenomena

Data is originally the plural form of datum, but nowadays it is frequently

used as a singular word. The same holds for hypermedia. ”The data is bi-
assed”, ”Hypermedia offers a new way to implement learning environments”

Notice also:

• If the suffix is {-s,-ss,-sh,-ch,-x,-z} in singular → -es in plural,

e.g. research – researches, approach – approaches, quiz – quizzes

• The same happens with most words which have suffix -o, unless the
word is abbreviated or of foreign origin. E.g.
cargo – cargoes, but photo – photos, dynamo – dynamos

• After consonant -y changes to -ies in plural. E.g. floppy – floppies.

Singular words which look like plural forms

The names of disciplines: mathematics, statistics, physics.
4.2. NOUNS 39

”Statistics is the precessor of data mining.”

news is also singular!

”Good news is that the algorithm works in O(n) time”

4.2.2 Countable and uncountable nouns

Countable nouns (C-words) refer to things which can be counted, while
things referred by uncountable nouns cannot be counted.
Uncountable nouns (U-words) can be divided into three groups:

1. Words expressing material: water, air, wood, ...

2. Abstract words: life, time, work, strength, ...

3. Exceptional: advice, information, news, equipment, money

Notes
• Uncountable words are missing the plural form!

• Notice that sometimes a noun can be either a countable or an un-

countable word depending on the meaning. E.g. science (when you
refer generally to natural sciences) – a science (when you refer to a
discipline).

• The words in group 3 are grammatically singular but they have also
plural meaning. If you want to refer to a singular piece you have to
express it in another way: ”a piece of information”, ”an item of news”,
”a bit of advice”.

”This information is important”! ”All advice is good!

4.2.3 Extra: differences between British and American

English
Some nouns have different spelling in British and American English. Try to
use systematically either British or American forms!
More differences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American and British
English differences and http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/∼jphb/american.
html.
40 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

British American
colour color
neighbour neighbor
behaviour behavior
favour favor
honour honor
metre (unit) meter
meter (device) meter
centre/center center
analogue analog
dialogue dialog
encyclopaedia encyclopedia
arguement argument
judgement judgment
programme (academic, tv) program
program (computer) program
defence defense
practice (noun)1 practise
maths math
speciality specialty

4.3 Compound words

The practices vary, and it is hard to give exact rules when words should be
written together, with a hyphen −, or separately.

• If the words have become one concept, they are usually written to-
gether, e.g. ”software”, ”keyboard”, ”database”

• If the independent meaning of words is emphasized, they are hyphened,

e.g. ”non-smoker” (cs example?)

• Hyphen is often used when the concept consists of more than two words:
”depth-first search”, ”between-cluster variation”, ”feed-forward neural
network”, ”first-order logic”

• Multiple word adjectives are usually hyphened, e.g. ”data-driven”,

”model-based”, ”class-conditional”

• If the first part is a symbol or an abbreviation, the word is hyphened,

e.g. ”N P -complete”, ”k-nearest neighbour method”, ”3-dimensional”.
4.4. ARTICLES 41

• Some common phrases have become compound words in American En-

glish, but remained as phrases in British English. E.g. in American En-
glish you can spell ”trademark”, but in British English ”trade mark”
or ”trade-mark”. (cs example?)

• Notice that many words which are compound in your mother tongue
are written separately in English: ”data set”, ”density function”, ”wave
length” (this is typical especially for long words)

Problem: how should we spell the following computer science terms?

overfitting, nondeterministic, time demanding, drop-out, EM-algorithm

4.4 Articles
4.4.1 Position
Basic rule: before the noun phrase (a noun + preceeding attributes)
Exceptions:

{what, such, quite, rather, half} + a/an + noun phrase

1.
”Half an hour”, ”quite a fast system”
(In American English the rules are not so strict concerning quite,
rather, and half.)

{too, as, so, how, however} + adj. + a/an + noun

2.
”Too great a distance”, ”so long a time”, ”as big a difference”

{all, both, double, twice, half} + the + noun

3.
”All the methods”, ”twice the time”, ”double the amount”

4.4.2 Use of articles

Basic rules:
42 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

noun

the whole
definite undefinite general class
familiar unknown concept

a/an no article the

the some/any

Definite and indefinite concepts

A concept is indefinite, when you mention it first time, and it is not clear
from the context. Usually this kind of expressions are describing: ”There
was a time delay between processes A and B.”
It is definite, when

• you mention it again (”The time delay was about 10 ms”)

• the context defines what you mean (”The left-most bit is always 1.”,
”The result of process A were correct.”)

• the concept is familiar to everybody (the Earth, the sun, the moon)

Usually this kind of expressions are defining: ”The delay between two pro-
cesses P1 and P2 is tend (P1 ) − tstart (P2 ).”

When you refer to an indefinite concept

a singular C-word → a/an
a plural C-word + positive clause → some
a plural C-word + negative or interrogative clause → any
a U-word + pos. clause → some
a U-word + neg. or interr. clause → any

When you refer to something generally

a plural C-word or a U-word → no article

”Students need time to process new infromation”

4.4. ARTICLES 43

When you refer to the whole class

a singular C-word → a/an

”The computer cannot solve all problems”

(which means that none of the computers can solve all problems, the property
concerns the class of all computers)

Exceptional expressions
Sometimes you can use a/an article with an abstract word:

• when the word is proceeded by a describing relative clause ”There is a

danger that the model overfits”

• expressions ”a /short/long time”, ”a while”

The article with ordinal numbers and some adjectives

Definite article ”the” is used

• when the noun is preceeded by an ordinal number (”The first attribute

describes...”)

• when the noun is preceeded by an adjective expressing order (”the next

attribute”, ”in the following chapter”)

• with adjectives same, only, right, wrong (”The results were the same”,
”The only model which has this property is X”))

Notice: ”the” is not used with ordinal numbers or adjective ”last”, when
you refer to the performance in a competition (”Program X came first and
program Y was last when the programs were compared by the Z test.)

Task: Try to draw a complete decision tree for selecting articles

44 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.4.3 Hints
A better decision tree for articles:

Noun type
(in the context)
countable uncountable

Definite? Definite?
no yes no yes

Number? the no article the

singular plural

a/an no article

When a noun can be used as a countable or an uncountable concept

The use of articles depends on the concept which is meant in the current
context. For example, word memory can have at least three meanings:

1. The store of things learnt or the power or process of recalling (in our
brains) → generally uncountable. ”Memory can be divided into two
classes: short-term memory and long-term memory. The short-term
memory...” However, you can say: ”I have a good memory”.

2. The object of recall → countable. ”My earliest memories”

3. The capacity of a computer to store information → uncountable. In

the cs context, you can suppose it as a known concept and use article
the (always?). ”The data is loaded into the main memory”

Time is another word which can be used in different ways. It can mean a
limited period or interval, an indefinite period or duration, or it can express
an occasion of repeated actions. In addition, it occurs in several phrases. By
default, time is uncountable (either no article or article ”the”).
4.4. ARTICLES 45

1. Without any article:

”Time will show...”
”It is time to do sg.”
”It takes time...”
”on time” (or ”in time”)

2. Article ”the”
”all the time”
”at the same time”

3. Article ”a”:
”It is a long time...”
”one at a time” (i.e. one by one)

4. Plural:
”many times”
”modern times”

Hint: could you use ”any” or ”some”?

Hint: Try if you could use words any or some before the noun. If you can,
it is indefinite. This means that you cannot use article ”the”.
”The grammar is not strict in (any) spoken language”
”The disk contains (some) space for back-up files”
”There is some reason for this behaviour” → ”There is a reason for this
behaviour”.

Hint: are you referring to sg particular?

If you have need to say ”This particular x”, say ”The x”, where x is a noun.
”This particular” hints that you have already talked about x and it is known
(definite).
Don’t use pronouns, if you mean article ”the”! ”This x” can often be replaced
by ”the x” (where x is a noun).

Hint: could you use ∃ or ∀?

Imagine the concept C as a set (universum) of all its instances. E.g. concept
”computer” is a set of all possible computers.
If you want to express ∃x ∈ C such that P (x) (there is some x in C for which
holds property P ), use article a/an. ”A computer could solve this problem
faster.” (maybe not all of them, but some computers can)
46 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

If you want to express ∀x ∈ CP (x) (for all x in C property P holds; i.e.

it holds for the whole set C), use article the. Now you refer to the whole
class of xs in C, which is definite. ”The computer can solve only mechanical
problems.” (all computers can do this)
Notice that this technique suits only for countable concepts!

Articles before variable names?

In cs, we often use the names of variables, data sets, models, etc.

• When you use the name without any modifying word → no article
”X is independent from Y ”, ”S contains no outliers”

• When you use a modifying word like ”set”, vector”, ”model” etc. before
the name →
Two habits:

1. No article when you mention the entity for the first time. After
that use definite article ”the”, or
2. Never any articles.
4.4. ARTICLES 47

Exercises
Task 1: Add the correct articles to the following sentences or mark the
absence of articles by −!

1. true positive rate was higher in method X than method

Y.

2. method X had higher true positive rate than method

Y.

3. memory means power or process of recalling.

4. X is algorithm which solves Travelling Salesman problem.

algorithm X is fastest among all known T SP algo-
rithms.

5. data set X follows Normal distribution with parameters

2
µ and σ . parameter µ is mean of set X and parameter
σ 2 is variance of X.

6. problem X belongs to class P , if it has polynomial time

algorithm Y . time complexity of algorithm Y is O(p(n))
where n is size of input and p is polynomial function.

7. In next section we introduce theory of Bloom filters.

8. To assess students’ proram codes, we construct bug library.

bug library contains all errors which have occured in students’
programs.

9. infinite time Turing machines extend idea of traditional

Turing machines.

10. In pattern extraction we produce set of new attributes

from original ones. goal is to find such set of attributes
which describes data best. goodness of representation
dependes on modelling purpose, and in practice we have to
define appropriate goodness measure.

11. In clustering analysis we divide data points into clusters

such that all data points in one cluster are similar to each other
but different from data points in other clusters.
48 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

12. episode is set of events which occur together. If order

of events is fixed, episod is called serial.

13. There is always danger that model overfits. danger

that model overfits is unavoidable.

14. main parts of computer are central unit, hard

disk, and i/o devices. central unit is responsible for all
computation.

Task 2: Are the following words countable or uncountable? Which articles

can you use with them? Give example sentences!

• space

• requirement

• model

• program

• computation

• power

• capacity

• data

• information

• knowledge

• recognition

• software

• hardware

• code

• value

• property

• strength
4.4. ARTICLES 49

• weakness

• use

• usability
50 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.5 Pronouns
Two important rules when you use pronouns:

1. When a pronoun refers to a noun in the preceding sentence,

make sure that the referred is obvious!

2. Each pronoun should agree with the referant in number and

gender.

4.5.1 Unclear references

• The simple pronouns – it, they, this, that, these, those – do often create
ambiguities.
• Goal: the reader should not have to scan the previous sentence to
understand what you mean.
• Recommendation: Avoid them, when possible! If you use them,
always check twice that the meaning is not ambiguous!
• Never use ”those” – it is usually a sign that the sentence is foggy.
”There was no difference in the accuracy of models between those which
belonged to group A and those which belonged to group B. → ”The
models in groups A and B were equally accurate.”
• Do not use ”it” to begin a sentence, if it is not absolutely clear, what
it refers! (Exception: expressions like ”It is difficult to estimate...”
require ”it” as a formal subject.)
• Hint: often you can replace ”this/these” + noun by ”the” + noun!
”This experiment demonstrated...” → ”The experiment demonstrated...”

4.5.2 Pronouns which require singular verb form

{everybody, anybody, nobody, everyone, anyone, no one} → verb is singular

4.5.3 Every vs. all

every all
+ singular noun + singular or plural noun
when you talk generally when you mean sg certain
4.5. PRONOUNS 51

4.5.4 Many vs. several

several < many

several ≈ some

4.5.5 Phrases

one – the other (singular)

some – the others (plural)

each other, e.g. ”X and Y affect each other”

This kind of + singular noun, e.g. ”This kind of system...”
If you want plural you have to say ”Systems of this kind...”

on one’s own, e.g. ”The students solved the task on their own”.

”All but one point belong to cluster 1”

”First of all, we have to initialize the parameters”
”On the one hand, the system is stable, on the other hand, it has poor
accuracy”
”The initialization phase is time demanding. Otherwise the program is very
efficient.”

4.5.6 Relative pronouns

Relative pronouns (who, which, that) are used in relative clauses. To

understand their use we have to study also relative clauses.
→ Section Relative clauses.
52 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.5.7 Extra material: Tricks for gender-neutral lan-

guage

Trick Incorrect Correct

Use plural The student returned his solution. The students returned their solutions
Article ”the” The student returned the solution.
Drop the pronoun The user himself defines the The user defines the preferences.
preferences.
Special expressions man, mankind people, human beings, humankind
man-machine interface user-system interface,
human-computer interface
Researchers’ wives Researchers’ spouses
mothering pareting, nurturing
chairman chairperson, chair, head
Mrs. Smith Jane Smith
housewife homemaker

4.6 Adjectives
These seem to be well mastered, just two notes:

1. Avoid vague adjectives!

2. How to derive and use comparative and superlative forms?

4.6.1 Vague adjecives

• Do not use vague adjectives. Especially the adjectives which describe
amounts (large, small, huge) are very context-sensitive!

• E.g. for statisticians, a data set of 500 rows is quite large, while for a
data miner it is extremely small → numbers are more exact!

• The expressions become even vaguer, when you add modifiers ”quite”,
”rather”, ”very”, etc. Skip them always when possible!

4.6.2 Comparative and superlative

Basic rule: use -er/-est for short adjectives, and more/most for longer ones.
4.6. ADJECTIVES 53

Adjective type Comparative Superlative Examples

1-syllable adjectives -er -est strong, stronger,
the strongest
2-syllables adjective with -er est narrow, narrower,
suffix -y, -ow, -er the narrowest
2-syllables adjective with -er est noble, nobler, noblest
suffix consonant + le
all other adjectives more + adj. most + adj. efficient, more efficient,
the most efficient
participes verb+{-ed, -ing} more most interesting, more interesting,
when used as adjectives the most interesting
irregular adjectives good, better, the best
bad, worse, the worst

Notice the spelling:

• the consonant is doubled in a short stressed syllable: big, bigger, the

biggest

• -y becomes -ie: easy, easier, easiest

4.6.3 When you compare things

When you use the comparative, make clear what you are referring!

”Problem X is easier to solve” (than what?)

Basic structure:

X is as efficient as Y (X and Y are equally efficient)

X is more efficient than Y

Exceptional expressions:

X is different from Y
X is similar to Y
X is the same as Y
X is inferior/superior to Y
X is equal to Y (Notice: use ”X equals Y ” only in math, for X = Y )
54 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.7 Adverbs
Adverbs answer questions When? Where? What? Why? How?
They express

• time (immediately, now, soon, later, next)

• place (here, there, everywhere)

• manner (easily, temporarily, well, poorly)

• degree (very, quite, ...) → Avoid in scientific texts!

• frequency (often, seldom, usually, sometimes)

• speaker’s attitude ”Fortunately, the data set is small, and function f

can be computed in real time.” → use sparsely!

Notes:

• Recommendation: Use expressive verbs and nouns which express the

most of message, and as few adverbs/prepositional phrases as possible!

• Use introductory adverbs like ”fortunately, similarly, conversely, cer-

tainly” carefully, as a synonum to expressions ”it is fortunate” or ”in
a similar manner”. Drop them if they are not needed.

• Notice that ”importantly” and ”interestingly” are not proper adverbs.

E.g.
”More importantly, the accuracy can actually increse when the com-
plexity is reduced”
→ ”More important, the accuracy can actually increse when the com-
plexity is reduced.”

”Interetingly, we found that...”

→ ”An interesting finding was that...”

4.7.1 The position of adverbs in a sentence

The adverb can be

1. in the beginning, when you express time or attitude. E.g. ”Evidently,

the students’ learning outcomes depend on their effort”, ”Later, we
realized that...”
4.7. ADVERBS 55

2. in the end, when you express way, time or place. E.g. “This problem
occurs frequently in sparse data.”

3. in the middle, when you express frequency or attitude. Notice that

already behaves in the same way. E.g. ”In knowledge discovery, we
assume that the features have been already extracted”

An adverb should clearly refer to the word it modifies!

4.7.2 Special cases

still and yet

• Still (mostly in positive sentences): before the main verb, but after
be-verb. ”These enlargements are still unimplemented”

• Yet (mostly in negative or interrogative sentences): in the end. ”These

enlargements have not been implemented yet.

• If still or yet is used in the beginning, it means ”however”.

so and such

• So: before adjectives or adverbs which are not succeeded by nouns.

E.g. ”The time complexity is not so hard”

• Such: when an adjective is succeeded by a noun. E.g. ”Such time

complexity is infeasible”

• Notice the article ”a/an”, if the noun is countable: ”such a system”,

”such an algorithm”

4.7.3 Extra: How to derive adverbs from adjectives?

Basic rule

Basic rule: by -ly suffix:adverb = adj. + ”ly”

E.g. poor – poorly
56 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

Exceptions
Adjctive Adverb Examples
suffix
-y -ily easy – easily
-e -ly whole – wholly, true – truly
-ic -ally automatic – automatically,
systematic – systematically
Exception: public – publicly
-able/-ible -l disappears sensible –sensibly
-ly in a <adj.> way in a friendly way
If you are not sure how to derive an adverb, check it from a dictionary!

Adverb = adjective
fast, hard, lat, straight, low, wrong, right, long

Notice the difference in meaning (both can be used as adverbs):

deep vs. deeply
hard vs. hardly
high vs. highly
most vs. mostly

Task: Draw a decision tree for deriving adverbs from adjectives!

4.7.4 Comparing adverbs

Adverb type Comparative, superlative Examples
-ly suffix more <adv.>, most <adv> more carefully, most carefully
like adjective -er, -est faster, fastest

Exceptions: well, badly, much, little, far

”This is a less desirable solution”, ”The X algorithm peforms worse/better

than Y algorithm”

Notice:

• far, farther, farthest, when you express distance, E.g.

”Point x lies farthest from the centre.”
4.8. PARALLEL STRUCTURES 57

• far, further, furthest, when you express distance, time, or in an abstract

context. E.g.
”In Chapter X, we will analyze this problem further” or ”This problem
is further analyzed in Chapter X”

4.8 Parallel structures

Conjunctions and some special phrases are used to combine words, word
groups (phrases), clauses or sentences. Here we concentrate on combining
parallel elements. A different structure is needed for combining a main clause
and a subordinate clause. → Section Sentences.

Parallel structures are used to present parallel ideas.

Parallel structure = words, phrases, clauses or sentences combined

by commas and/or conjunctions. Here we call the combined items as
parallel items.

• Parallel items are combined by parallel conjunctions (and, or, but, ...).

• Notice that lists are also parallel structures!

• Often the parallel structure lists alternatives or makes some kind of

comparison: the items belong to the same or smilar classes or to two
opposite classes.

• E.g.
”Method X has several advantages: it is easy to implement, it works
in polynomial time, and it can use both numeric and categorial data.”
contains two parallel structures: three advantages (”it is, it works, it
can”) in a list and ”both numeric and categorial data”

4.8.1 Basic rules

The parallel structure should be consistent in two ways

• Semantically: the concepts referred by parallel items should be com-

parable, i.e. the comparison should make sense.
58 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

• Syntactically: the items should have similar grammatic structure. All

of them should be either nouns, noun phrases, verb phrases, or clauses.
In addition, they should be in the same form, e.g. you cannot combine
”to” + verb and a verb without ”to”.
”The problem is both hard to define and solve”
→ ”The problem is both hard to define and to solve”

4.8.2 Parallel items combined by conjunctions and, or,

but
The most common form of parallel structures!

”The method has low space but high time requirement”

→ ”The method has low space requirement but high time requirement.

”The students were told to make themselves comfortable, to read the instruc-
tions, and that they should ask about anything they did not understand”
→ ”The students were told to make themselves comfortable, to read the in-
structions, and to ask about anything they did not understand”

”The results show that X did not affect the error rate and the model over-
fitted the data”
→ ”The results show that X did not affect the error rate and that the model
overfitted the data”

4.8.3 Lists
Notice that elements in a list should be in a parallel form!

Example 1
”Boud [Bou89] has listed general characteristics which are typical for problem-
based courses:

• Acknowledgement of learners’ experience.

• Emphasis on students taking responsibility of their own learning.

• Crossing of boundaries between disciplines.

• Focus on the processes of knowledge acquisition rather than the prod-

ucts of such processes.
4.8. PARALLEL STRUCTURES 59

• Change in staff role from instructor to facilitator.

• Students’ self- and peer assessment of learning.

• Focus on communication and interpersonal skills.”

Example 2
”The clustering methods can be divided into three categories:

1. Hierarchical methods construct a hierarchy of (typically) nested clus-

ters.

2. Partitioning methods try to find optimal partitioning into a specified

number of clusters.

3. Probabilistic model-based clustering tries to find the underlying proba-

bilistic model which has produced the data.”

Example 3
”The whole procedure is following:

1. Determine the number of clusters k

2. Choose parametric models (density functions fj ) for each of the clus-

ters.

3. Determine the component probabilities πk and parameters θk from

data.

4. Assign each point to the most probable cluster.”

Example 4
”According to O’Shea [OSh00], an intelligent tutoring system should be

• robust,

• helpfull

• simple,

• transparent

• flexible
60 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

• ...

• sensitive, and

• powerfull.”

Notice! The previous kind of list should be avoided, because it can be written
as normal sentences. A list was used above, because 13 items were listed (and
they were analyzed later). If you list only a couple of items (e.g. less than
5), write them as a normal sentence!

4.8.4 Parallel items combined by conjunction pairs

Sometimes the parallel expression consists of two conjunctions like

• between...and,

• both...and,

• either...or,

• neither...nor, and

• not only...but.

The first conjunction should be immediately before the first part of the par-
allelism.

between – and
”between 20-22 years of age” → ”between 20 and 22 years of age”

”We recorded the difference between the students who completed the first
task and the second task”
→ ”We recorded the difference between the students who completed the
first task and the students who completed the second task.”

both – and
”The task is both easy to solve and efficient.” (Doesn’t make any sense!)
→ The task is both easy to solve and can be solved efficienty.”

Or another structure:
”The task is easy and the solution is efficient.”
4.8. PARALLEL STRUCTURES 61

either – or

”The students either gave the worst answer or the best answer.”
→ ”The students either gave the worst answer or gave the best answer.” or
”The students gave either the worst answer or the best answer.”

neither – nor

In negative clauses → less often needed in sciwri! (Say things in a positive

way, when possible.)

”X solves the problems of traditional clustering algorithms. Neither out-

liers nor missing values affect the clustering quality.”

(Grammatically correct, but better to say: ”X solves the problems of tradi-

tional clustering algorithms. It is not sensitive to outliers or missing values.”)

not only – but (also)

”The task is not only easy to solve but also efficient”

→ ”The task is not only easy to solve but the solution is also efficient” or
”The task is not only easy to solve but it can also be solved efficiently”

Once again: say in a positive way, when possible – clearer!

On the one hand – on the other hand

• A special expression: can combine either clauses or parallel sentences!

• An affective way to describe opposite points, like advantages and dis-

advantages!

”On the one hand, a complex model can describe the data well, but on
the other hand, it overfits easily.”

”There is always a wrestling between the descriptive power and the general-
ization ability. On the one hand, too complex a model describes the data
well, but it does not generalize to any new data. On the other hand, too
simple a model generalizes well, but it does not describe the essential features
in the data.”
62 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.8.5 The comparative – the comparative

The comparative forms of adjectives can used in a parallel way in the follow-
ing structure:

the + comparative + x + comma + the + comparative + y, where

x and y complete the clauses.

”The more complex the model is, the better it describes the training
data.”

If x and y are missing, then no comma:

”The sooner the better.”

Notice: Use sparsely!

4.8.6 Parallel sentences

Numerating properties or ideas is an efficient way to create logical structures
into paragraphs. The sentences in the list begin by ordinal numbers ”First,
Second, Third”. (Notice: you can say ”Firstly”, but there is no need for that!)

”X model has three important properties: First, the model structure is easy
to understand. This is a critical feature in adaptive learning environments,
as we have noted before. Second, the model can be learnt efficiently from
data. There are feasible algorithms for both numeric and categorial data.
Third, the model tolerates noise and missing values.”

4.9 Prepositions
• Be careful with prepositions. A wrong preposition can give a totally
different meaning!

• Hint: When you use a preposition, visualize the direction it is signalling

and ask yourself if it is appropriate.

• If you are unsure about the use of a preposition, ask yourself what a
cat would do! (Fedor’s sciwri book)
Cats sit on mats, go into rooms, are part of the family, roam among
the flowers.
4.9. PREPOSITIONS 63

4.9.1 Expressing location

• Usually in, e.g. ”in set X”

• If an exact location, then at, e.g. ”at point (x, y)”

• If the location can be imagined as a line or a surface, then on ”on the

x-axis”, ”on a time line”

Notice: ”on page 3”, ”on line 5”, ”on the Internet”

”A file is loaded from the hard disk into main memory.”

”results from the survey suggest...”
over – under/beneath
above – below

”X’s points were below the average points”

”The task is to optimize f under the given constraints”

4.9.2 Expressing time

• Exact time: at, e.g. ”at the moment”, ”at four o’clock”, ”at the same
time”

• Longer period of time: in, e.g. ”in the 1970’s”, ”in the future”, ”in five
minutes”, ”events occur close in time”

Notice: ”In the beginning/end” vs. ”At the beginning/end of sg”

4.9.3 Expressing the target or the receiver: to or for?

Basic rules:

• When direct receiver, then to

”The values are assigned to variables”

• When the final receiver (for whom sg is meant) then for

”I gave the book for Belinda to Tersia”
”The messages for nodes F and G are transfered to node D for rerout-
ing”
”A variety of methods have been developed for the clustering problem.”

• When sg is good or bad for sg, then for

”Problem-based learning is good for students”
64 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

Some verbs require either for or to:

1. If the verb is {bring, give, take, show, offer} → to

2. If the verb is {be, get, keep, make} → for

Sometimes the preposition can be missing, depending on the word order:

i) verb + receiver + object

ii) verb + object + to/for + receiver
iii) verb + to/for + receiver (no object)

• If the verb is tell, then always case i.

• If either object or receiver is pronoun, then the pronoun becomes before

the noun (case i or ii)

• If both are pronouns, then the object becomes first (case ii)

• If the verb is {belong, describe, explain, introduce, reply, say, speak,

suggest} → always to (cases i–iii)

Task: Draw a decision tree for deciding when to use ”to” or ”for”!

4.9.4 Special phrases

Some prepositional phrases just have to be remembered! (or checked)

constraint on sg (e.g. contraints on the order)

independent from sg but dependent on sg
different from sg but similar to sg
difference between sg and sg
prefer sg to sg
impact of sg on sg
influence on sg
effect on sg (but to affect sg)
focus on sg
perform in some manner
generalize to sg
a discussion about/on sg (but to discuss sg)
research on sg but a study of sg
reason for sg
4.9. PREPOSITIONS 65

opportunity of/for sg
in spite of sg (but despite sg)
regardless of sg
take into account
in relation to sg
in contrast with sg
a proportion of sg. (”a large proportion of data”)
in proportion to sg, proportional to sg (”The time complexity of f propor-
tional to n is...”)
the ratio of a to b = a/b
x% of y
under some conditions
by default
contrary to sg
in contrast
by contrast (∼ ”however”)
on the contrary
at an extreme

Examples: ”The model is linear in the number of variables k.”

”There are various reasons for this.”
”See [Ref] for details.”

Problem: compare with or to?

Depends on the meaning!

From Kdict:
Usage: Things are compared with each other in order to learn their relative
value or excellence. Thus we compare Cicero with Demosthenes, for the
sake of deciding which was the greater orator. One thing is compared to
another because of a real or fanciful likeness or similarity which exists between
them. Thus it has been common to compare the eloquence of Demosthenes
to a thunderbolt, on account of its force, and the eloquence of Cicero to
a conflagration, on account of its splendor. Burke compares the parks of
London to the lungs of the human body.
66 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.10 Sentences
4.10.1 Terminology
• A sentence consist of one or more clauses
• A clause contains always a subject and a predicate, and usually an
object
– An independent clause (main clause) can make a sentence alone.
– A dependent clause (subordinate clause) needs an independent
clause for support.

4.10.2 Sentence types

The sentence type depends on the type of its main clause. The main types
are following:

1. Statement (ends by a full stop: ”x is y.”)

2. Question (ends by a question-mark: Is x y?”)
3. Order (ends by an exclamation mark: ”Be x y!)

In scientific writing the default type is the statement. Direct questions and
orders are seldom used.
Questions suit best to the introduction where you state your main research
questions clearly and concretely, e.g.
”The main research questions are the following:

1. What is the relationship between X and Y ?

2. When X can be applied?
3. Can we apply X in Z?
4. How X can be extended?”

Orders can be useful in pseudo code, when you describe some method. E.g.
”Search such ci that d(x, ci ) is minimal”.

Dependent clauses can be divided into the following types:

1. Clauses beginning by sub-ordinating conjunctions (when, if, because,

while, ...)
4.10. SENTENCES 67

2. Relative clauses (begin by relative pronouns which, who, that)

3. Indirect questions (begin by question words or if/whether)

Examples:
”The dependency is trivial, because Y = f (X).”
”X and Y are linearly independent, if the correlation coefficient, corr(X, Y ),
is zero”
”Let ci be the cluster which is closest to x.
”We select the first model that fits the data.”
”First we should study what is the relationship between X and Y .”
”The main problem is whether X can be applied in Z.”
”We analyze the conditions under which X can be applied.”

4.10.3 Sentence length?

Recommendations:

• always less than 30 words, preferably less than 20 words!

• 1-3 clauses

• expresses one idea

If you tend to write too long sentences, try the following:

1. Identify the main subject-predicate-object section

2. Prune or compress everything else, which is not needed

3. Check the verb structures and ask yourself if they could be shorter

E.g. verb structure ”has been shown” can often be replaced by ”is”.

Notice! Don’t go into the other extreme when you shorten sentences! If the
clarity suffers, then a longer sentence is better.

Analogue: A good model of data does not overfit nor underfit, i.e. it is
simple enough but still expresses all essential features. Now the sentence is
a model of the idea you want to express.
68 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.10.4 Word order

The order of words has a strong impact on the meaning!

E.g. ”There is, however, currently no information about the limitations of

quantum computers.” →
”However, there is no current information about the limitations of analog
computers.” →
”However, the limitations of current quantum computers are not known.”

The basic word order: subject–predicate–object

Recommendation: use the basic format subject-predicate-

object in your sentences. You can add attributes, phrases and
clauses, but don’t deviate too far from the basic format.

Why?

• Goal: put the most important information to the beginning of a sen-

tence! ”X is a new algorithm for the TS problem”

• Or begin by a familiar thing and put the new information to the end
”The probabilities are updated by the Bayes rule:” + the equation.

• Often the sentence is most informative, if you express the most impor-
tant topic by the subject.

• This format helps to write clear and compact sentences

The adverbs and prepositional phrases occur in order: way, place, time.

”The nearest neighbours can be identified efficiently (way) in a dendro-

gram (place)”.
”The values can be updated easily (way) in linear time (time)”.

Verb modifiers: in the middle of clause

Words which modify the predicate (the main verb) are located in the middle
of the clause:

• Adverbs which express frequency: always, ever, never, often, seldom,

sometimes, usually.
4.10. SENTENCES 69

• Adverbs which express degree: almost, quite, certainly, completely,

hardly, just, only, quite, really.

• Other words which modify the verb: already, also, still.

Hint: always consider if the word modifies the verb (the action) or the object
(the target).

Verb modifiers are located

• before the predicate, if the verb consists of one word and is not the
”be”-verb.

• after the first auxiliary verb, if the verb consists of several words.

• always after the ”be”-verb.

E.g.
”X often implies Y .”
”The method gets sometimes stuck at a local optimum”
”The data was probably biased.”

Task: Draw a decision tree for deciding the position of adverbs!

Problem: some words like ”only” can modify also other words!
→ Put the word ”only” next to the word or phrase it modifies!
E.g. (notice the different meaning):

”X was the only method which could parse the LL(1) grammar”
”X was the method which could only parse the LL(1) grammar”
”X was the method which could parse only the LL(1) grammar”

Adverbs which can begin the clause

If the adverb expresses time, it can be also in the beginning:
”Next, the data is loaded to the main memory.”
This gives more emphasis to the word. It is also used, when there are other
adverbs/prepositional phrases in the end of the clause.

Introductory adverbs like ”obviously”, ”fortunately”, etc. are always set to

the beginning (if they are needed).
70 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.10.5 Combining clauses

Say the main message in the independent clauses! Use dependent
clauses only to add details.

Combining two independent clauses

A compound sentence= two or more independent clauses which are

combined by co-ordinating conjunctions or (rarely) by semicolons.

• In principle, you can combine several independent clauses, but in prac-

tice, combine only two main clauses (unless the clauses have the same
subject which is mentioned only once).

• The ideas expressed in the clauses must be closely connected (otherwise

separate sentences).

• The most common co-ordinating conjunctions are and and but.

– and just links one idea to another (doesn’t describe the relation-
ship – typical for the children’s language and dreams where things
just happen). E.g. ”The data is sparse and the model overfits eas-
ily.”
– but establishes an interesting relationship between the ideas →
a higher level of argument. E.g. ”The data was sparse, but the
model did not overfit.” (=”Even if the data was sparse, the model
did not overfit.”)

• Commas? If the clauses have the same subject, then no commas. Oth-
erwise usually a comma, unless the clauses are very short.

4.10.6 Combining clauses by sub-ordinating conjunc-

tions
The basic form: an independent clause + a sub-ordinating conjunc-
tion + a dependent clause.
The most common sub-ordinating conjunctions express

1. a chronological order: when, as, as soon as, while, after, before,

until, since
4.10. SENTENCES 71

2. a conditional relationship: if, unless. If-clauses can also begin the

sentence: ”If the order is fixed, the episode is called serial.” Notice:
unless = if... not

3. a reason: because (Recommendation: reserve word ”since” to express

chronological order)

4. a purpose: so that (You can also use in order to + infinitive verb.)

5. an admission: although, even if

Examples:
”The search can be halted as soon as minf r proportion of data is checked”
”The method is time-efficient, because all the parameters can be updated in
one loop”

When you combine

• an independent clause + a dependent clause → sometimes but not

always a comma (e.g. before but, but not before that).

• a dependent clause + an independent clause → always a comma.

4.10.7 Relative clauses

Correlate = referred word or clause, e.g. ”An outlier is a data
point which lies outside the clusters”, ”Students who solved the
task...”, ”The time complexity is quadratic, which is sometimes
undesirable...”

Restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses

Relative clauses can be divided into two categories:

1. Restrictive or essential relative clause

• defines the correlate

• is necessary for understanding the sentence correctly
• no commas
• ”X is an algorithm which solves the Travelling Salesman problem
in O(nk ) time.”
72 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

2. Non-restrictive or non-essential relative clause

• gives only additional information about the correlate
• is separated from the main clause by commas
• ”X, which solves the T S problem, works in O(nk ) time.”
• can refer to the previous clause

Notice that in spoken language we can drop the relative pronoun, if it is

not the subject of the clause. In scientific writing, it is better to write all
pronouns, because it should always be clear what you are referring.

Which relative pronoun to select?

1. who, whose, whom

• who refers to a person.

• whose is the genitive form, e.g. ”The student, whose solution was
correct, got extra points.”
• Notice that whose can refer to things and objects, too!
”X is an example of problems which belong to class N P and whose
known solutions are exponential.”
• whom is used as an object and with prepositions, e.g. ”The student,
about whom I told you yesterday, wants to speak to you.”

2. which

• refers to things and objects.

• can be used as a subject or an object or with prepositions.
”X is a trick which helps to estimate the parameters more accurately.”
”Let X be the variable which Y depends on.”
• when you refer to an entire clause, e.g. ”The time complexity is quadratic,
which is sometimes undesirable...”, ”All students cannot study them-
selves, which means that tutors are needed.”
• In most cases, the genitive form can be either of which or whose. E.g.
”A computer, the cache of which is disabled, is less efficient...” = ”A
computer, whose cache is disabled, ...”
4.10. SENTENCES 73

• However, when you refer to abstract nouns, use of which structure:

”N.N. has introduced a new method the complexity of which is expo-
nential.” (Problem: is this rule still valid? Could we nowadays use
also ”whose”?)

3. that

• can be used only in restrictive relative clauses! → never use

comma before it!

• can refer to people or things,

”The student that has solved the task”, ”The task that was solved”

• can be used both as a subject and an object.

• If you need prepositions, they have to be in the end of the clause!

”The problem that we talked about...”

• that is often used, when

– the correlate is {all, little, much}, e.g. ”all that we know”

– with superlative, ”the best solution that we can invent”
– with ordinal numbers (first, second,...), last, and only,
”the only algorithm that is comparable with X is Y ”

4. what

• what contains also the correlate

• Only in special expressions!

• E.g.
”WYSIWYG means ’What you see is what you get’.”
”This is what we know so far.”

Extra: When to use who and when whom?

Problem: Is the relative pronoun a subject or an object (who or whom)?

Hint: turn the subordinate clause around and substitute the relative pro-
noun by a personal pronoun. If you can use ”she” or ”he”, it is subject
74 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

(who), if ”her” or ”him”, then it is an object (whom).

E.g. ”N.N. is the student who/whom I mentioned earlier”

→ ”N.N. is the student. I mentioned her/him earlier”
⇒ ”whom” is the correct choice.

4.10.8 Indirect questions

The dependent clause begins by a question word what, why, when, where,
how or if/whether when the corresponding direct question begins by a verb.

”First we should study what is the relationship between X and Y .”

”The main problem is whether X can be applied in Z.”

• The word order is direct!

• No auxiliary word do

• No comma!

• No question mark

4.11 Paragraphs
How to combine sentences? How to begin paragraphs? How to link para-
graphs to each other? Introductory paragraphs (at the beginning of a chap-
ter)

4.11.1 Combining sentences in a paragraph

1. Use (but do not overuse!) conjunctions or transitional words:

• Time links, when you describe a process: then, next, first-second-

third, while, ...
• Cause-effect links, when you describe reasons or results: therefore,
as a result, thus, ...
• Addition links, when you add points: in addition, moreover, sim-
ilarly, ...
• Contrast links, when you describe two sides of one thing: however,
despite (=inspite of sg), ...
4.11. PARAGRAPHS 75

• Other: For example,...

2. Link the beginning of a sentence to the end of the previous sentence.
E.g. the subject of sentence 2 is the object of sentence 1.
”A model consists of a model structure and model parameters. The
model structure defines...”
3. Repeat the key terms througout the paragraph. However, do not repeat
the same word twice in one sentence.

Task: Seach useful expressions from the text extract given to you!

4.11.2 Dividing a section into paragraphs

Logical structure

Logically structured disposition (topic outline) is the most important

thing in writing!

Analogy: In software engineering, the earliest errors (in specification and

design phases) are the most expensive, if they are not recognized in the be-
ginning. If you don’t plan, you write awful spaghette code which nobody
understands or can debug. Similarly, writing an illogical or a poorly or-
granized disposition can cause serious problems. In the worst case, you have
to write everything again!
→ Spend time and write the disposition carefully!

An iterative process:

1. The main structure of the whole thesis: the main chapters and their
contents in a couple of sentences or key words. The order of chapters.
2. For each chapter (or an article), the main sections + key words, intro-
ductory sentences or phrases. The order of sections.
3. In each section, the subsections or paragraphs. The introductory sen-
tences, key words, and the order of paragraphs. List the related tables
and figures.

Mark the points you wish to emphasize!

Suggestion: put your disposition on one side for a while, before you begin
writing.
76 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

A paragraph
The topic for each paragraph must be clearly stated – usually in the first
sentence = topic sentence.

• Helps the reader: tells what the paragraph is about.

• Helps the writer: forces you to organize the material logically.

• In an ideal case, you get a summary of the whole section by reading

the topic sentences.

• If you cannot write a clear topic sentence, ask yourself whether the
paragraph is needed at all!

An example paragraph with a topic sentence:

”Dependencies between attributes fall into two main categories. Dependen-

cies between discrete attributes are measured by satistical dependency, based
on the observed probability distribution. The dependencies between numeric
attributes are measured by functional dependency, based on individual data
points.”

Other good advice:

• Never begin with unimportant words. The beginning of a paragraph is

the most important.

• Omit superfluous phrases like

”First let us consider...”
”An interesting example which must be mentioned in this context is...”
”Next it must be noted that...”

• Emphasize important things by

– telling them in the beginning of a paragraph or beginning of a

sentence,
– expressing them in short sentences,
– repeating the key words, or
– numbering.

• Keep the same verb tense (change it only for good reasons).

• Express parallel things in parallel structures.

4.11. PARAGRAPHS 77

If it is hard to divide a section into paragraph, list the things in a bullet

list. Arrange the items and give them mini-subheadings. All items under
one such heading belong to one paragraph. Tell the topic (expressed in the
heading) in the topic sentence.

4.11.3 Introductory paragraphs

In the beginning of each chapter or a section having subsections, give 1-2
introductory paragraphs. These paragraphs tell what the chapter or section
is about, i.e. it introduces the topics of sections or subsections. In the be-
ginning of a chapter you can also introduce the main theme or problem and
motivate the reader.

Suggestion: just one brief paragraph in the beginning of a section, a longer

or a couple of paragraphs in the beginning of a chapter.

E.g. for the section ”Correlation analysis”:

”In the following, we recall the most common measure for correlation, Pear-
son correlation coefficient. We discuss restrictions and extensions of the
common correlation analysis. Finally, we analyze the ViSCoS data by Pear-
son correlation and correlation ratios to reveal linear and non-linear depen-
dencies.”

In the beginning of chapter ”Modelling dependencies between attributes”

(could be briefer):

”The main goal of predictive modelling is to predict a target variable Y from

a set of other variables X = {X1 , ..., Xk } ⊆ R. Variables X are called ex-
planarory, because they explain Y . The existence of such model requires that
Y depends on X. Thus, the first step of modelling process is the descrip-
tive analysis of dependencies between Y and X. The task is two-fold: First,
we should select an attribute set X which best explains Y . Then we should
analyze the type of dependency. Given this information, we can select the ap-
propriate predictive modelling paradigm and define restrictions for the model
structure.

In the following, we define the main types of dependencies for categorial and
numeric data. We introduce three techniques (correlation analysis, corre-
lation ratios, and multiple linear regression) for modelling dependencies in
numeric data and four techniques (χ2 independence test, mutual informa-
78 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

tion, association rules, and Bayesian networks) for categorial data. In both
cases we begin by analyzing pair-wise dependencies between two attributes,
before we analyze dependencies between multiple attributes X1 , ..., Xk and the
target attribute Y . This approach has two benefits. First, we can avoid test-
ing all 2k dependencies between subsets of {X1 , ..., Xk } and Y , if Y turns
out to be independent from some Xi . Second, this analysis can reveal im-
portant information about suitable model structures. For example, in some
modelling paradigms, like multiple linear regression and naive Bayes model,
the explanatory variables should be independent from each other. Finally,
we analyze the suitability of described modelling techniques for educational
domain.”

4.12 Punctuation
Goal: to make the text clearer. Unfortunately, the English punctuation
rules (especially the use of comma) do not always coincide with the rules of
your mother tongue.

Usually you manage with just two marks: full-stop and comma! The basic
rules for other marks are:

• Use colon ’:’ only when needed.

• Avoid semicolon ’;’ and dash ’–’.

• Avoid unnecessary parantheses ’(’...’)’.

4.12.1 Full-stop
Full-stop ends a full sentence. Do not use comma instead of full-stop to
separate independent clauses which are not logically related.

4.12.2 Comma
Comma is used
1. To separate introductory phrases and conjunctions (however, thus, sim-
ilarly, etc.):
”Ideally, all references are entered into a bitex database.”
”Theorem 1 is important for two reasons. First, it allows us to... Sec-
ond, it ...”
4.12. PUNCTUATION 79

”Despite the high time complexity, X is often used...”

”For example, we can search episodes in www log data...”

2. When the sentence begins with a dependent clause.

”Since x is a statistic, it is also a random variable.”
”If this condition is not satisfied, then the confidence bounds cannot
be used.”

3. When a non-restrcitive relative clause is embedded into an independent

clause or ends a sentence.
”X, which is responsible for data preprocessing, initializes Y .”

4. When two phrases with the same meaning are used side by side.
”One of the most useful statistics is x, the sample mean.”

5. When the sentence begins by an infinitive structure (a clause substi-

tute).
”To find the lower bound for the confedence interval, we isolate...”

6. To separate items in a list of three or more items. An ”Oxford comma”

= the last comma before and, or, or nor. ”X is simple, fast, and easy
to implement”

7. To avoid ambiguity.
”Instead of hundreds, thousands rows of data is required”
”Instead of 20, 50 students participated...”
”What the actual reason is, is not fully understood”
(better: ”The actual reason is not fully understood”)

No comma is used
1. When an independent clause is followed by a restrictive relative clause
or is embedded with a restrictive rel. clause (especially before that).
Exception: ”It must be remembered, however, that...”

2. Between two independent clauses (in British English).

3. Before an indirect question.

4. When you begin by a prepositional phrase expressing the place. ”In

this section we discuss...” ”In Chapter 3 we defined...”
80 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.12.3 Colon
Use colon between a grammatically complete introductory clause and a final
phrase or clause that illustrates or extends it. If the following clause is a
complete sentence, it begins with a capital letter.

”The formal definition of X is the following: (definition here)”

”X has several benefits: It is efficient, robust, and easy to implement.”

4.12.4 Dash
Dash is nearly always used in pairs. You can always use commas instead of
dashes. Additional details can also be separated by parantheses. Notice that
dash interrupts the contuinity of a sentence!

Advice: Do not use dash, if you are not sure how to use it!

”The two students – one cs student and one maths student – were tested
separately.”

4.12.5 Semicolon
Semicolon separates two independent clauses. It is stronger than a comma
but weaker than a full-stop. You can always replace it by a full-stop, and
sometimes by a comma structure.

Advice: Save semicolons to program code!

Suits to separate independent clauses in a list:

”Metric d has three properties:

1. d is reflexive, i.e. d(x, x) = 0 for all x;

2. d is symmetric, i.e. d(x, y) = d(y, x) for all x, y;

3. Triangular inequality holds for d, i.e. d(x, z) ≤ d(x, y) + d(y, z).

or to separate elements in a series which already contains commas:

”The colour order was red, yellow, blue; yellow, red, blue; or blue, yellor,
red.”
4.12. PUNCTUATION 81

4.12.6 Quotation marks

Quotation marks are necessary when you represent a direct citation!

You can use them also when you introduce a word or phrase used as an ironic
comment, as slang, or as an invented expression. Use the quotation marks
only when the new term is mentioned for the first time!

”Researchers have developed several measures to evaluate the ”interesting-

ness” of an association rule.”

Notice: when you use a word or letter as an linguistic example, you can use
a special font, e.g. italicize it (just be systematic with the font you select).
”According to algorithm X, words cat and God were similar.”

Similarly, when you mention variable names, values etc. use a special font
(unless they mathematical symbols → $ characters (math mode). E.g. ”X
can have three values low, medium, high.” ”Action1 is selected with the
probability of 0.6 and Action2 with the probability of 0.4.”
In latex
{\tt Action1}

4.12.7 Parantheses
Parantheses are used for two purposes:
• To introduce an abbreviation
”Minimum description length (MDL) principle is often used to...”
• To add extra details. Advice: do not overuse them!
”Two common choices are to represent a cluster by its centroid (central
point) or by its boundary points.”
”In minimum edit distance we define the minimum number of oper-
ations (e.g. insertion, deletion, substitution) needed to transform one
string to another.”
Sometimes you can give extra references (extra reading) in paranthesis:

”To restrict the future development of adaptive learning environments as little

as possible, we have adopted a wide (and visionary) view of context-aware
computing (ubiquitous computing (see e.g. [DA99,CLC05]), in which the
whole context – the user, her/his actual situation and all relevant information
– is used for determining the most appropriate action.”
82 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

4.13 Genitive: ’s or of?

Default: For animate things (people and animals) ’s: possessor’s
possessed (in plural possessors’ possessed).
For inanimate things of structure: the possessed of possessor.

Nowadays, ’s genitive can be used also for inanimate things, especially in

certain special cases (especially in American English!). However, never use
’s genitive for abstract things!

”The meaning of life”, ”The time complexity of algorithm X”.

4.13.1 Special cases where ’s genitive is used for unan-

imate things
1. Temporal expressions: ”two weeks’ holiday”, ”an hour’s work”. How-
ever, in some expressions only of is possible: ”in the middle of August”.

2. Sometimes when the noun is geographical (country or city): ”London’s

sights”. However, if the target expresses place (town, city, kingdom,
island), then of: ”The city of Joensuu”

3. When the noun expresses place and is followed by superlative: ”The

world’s best computer games”.

4. When possessor is a collective noun, ’s is often used, but of is also

possible: ”The board’s decision”.

5. When you express part–whole relation, ’s is often used, especially in

body parts ”the car’s doors”, ”the cat’s whiskers”.
Hint: If the possessed necessarily belongs to the possessor → ’s, if the
possessed can exist alone → of.

6. Some special phrases: ”For goodness’ sake”.

4.13.2 When of structure is necessary

’s genitive makes the possessed noun definite, i.e. possessor’s possessed
= the possessed of possessor.
→ definite article the in the of genitive.
If you want to express that the possessed is indefinite (one of many), of
genitive is the only choice (even if you refer to people): ”a son of the mayor”.
4.14. ABBREVIATIONS 83

4.13.3 Possessive form of pronouns

When the possessor is a pronoun, use the possessive pronouns!

{my, your, her/his, its, our, your, their} + possessed.

If the possessive pronoun is not followed by noun, then special forms {mine,
your, hers/his, ours, yours, theirs}. Seldom needed in scientific writing! (In
spoken language e.g. ”Whose cat is this? It is mine.”)

In some special cases (rarely) you can use structure ”of it” (referring to
unanimate things) to emphasize the possessed. ”I don’t remember the name
of it.”

4.14 Abbreviations
• Use abbreviations sparingly, especially the abbreviations which you de-
fine yourself for technical terms. E.g.
”The performance of NB and LR classifiers are measured by TP and
TN rates” vs.
”The performance of naive Bayes and linear regression classifiers are
measured by true positive and true negative rates”
• As a rule of thumb, if the term is used less than three times, don’t
introduce any new abbreviation for it.
• Use only those abbreviations that help you to communicate with your
reader.
• When the term is mentioned first time, write it out completely and give
the abbreviation immediately in parantheses. E.g.
”According to maximum likelihood (ML) principle ...”
• Notice that standard abbreviations do not have to be written out on
first use! Such abbreviations are a.m., i.e., vol., ed.
Notice that p.=page, pp.=pages
• Do not switch between the abbreviation and complete term in the same
paragraph.
• If you use special abbreviations in figures or tables, describe them in
the caption.
84 CHAPTER 4. GRAMMAR WITH STYLE NOTES

• Do not begin a sentence with a lowercase abbreviation or a symbol that

stands alone (e.g. α). If you have to begin by a symbol for clarity, then
capitalize the first letter of the word to which it is connected. E.g.
”k-Nearest neighbours method”
Chapter 5

Writing master’s thesis

5.1 Parts of the master’s thesis

See latex template on http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/
thesis.tex

5.1.1 Abstract
• Tells compactly the research problem, methods and results.

• At most 1 page, no literature references.

• In the end ACM classes + possibly key words.

5.1.2 Introduction
Typically 4-7 pages.

The introduction should define the problem clearly and give suffiecient back-
ground information for the following chapters. However, no details, yet!

• What is the purpose of the research? Main research questions?

• What is the scope? Indicate explicitely all limitations and restricting

assumptions!

• Why the topic is important or interesting?

• What methods are used?

85
86 CHAPTER 5. WRITING MASTER’S THESIS

• Briefly references to related research (just the main references – more

references in chapter ”Related research” or throughout the thesis)

• Emphasize your own contribution: what is original or new?

Introductions can be divided into sections, if it is easier to write, but it is

not necessary.
E.g. three sections:

1. Problem description, motivation and background (the heading could

be ”Overview”, ”Problem”, ”Motivation and background” etc.)

2. Results and contributions (what was done, what was new)

3. Organization (the chapters)

5.1.3 Main chapters

Usually 4-5 chapters (in addition to Introduction and Conclusions). A good
idea is to begin from background theory or related research.

5.1.4 Conclusions
Just 1-3 pages!

• Summarize the main results in a general level.

• Tell what was your own conctribution and what was based on other
sources.

• Possibly also critics (e.g. limitations), alternative approaches, topics for

future research.

• No more new results and seldomly any references (at most for alteran-
tive, unmentioned approaches)

5.1.5 References
• A rule of thumb: at least 20 references, but no more than 50. 30-35 is
often the ideal.

• The number of references depends on the topic. More references are

required in a literature review than in empirical research or an “appli-
cation report”.
5.1. PARTS OF THE MASTER’S THESIS 87

• The number of references is not a merit, but their quality is more

important!

• The references should be relevant, up-to-date, and represent different

approaches or schools among researchers.

• Important: all sources (listed in References) must be referred in the

text and the text should not contain any references which are not listed!
→ Bibtex takes care of this automatically. If you type references manu-
ally, latex complains only about missing references, but not about extra
references.

5.1.6 Appendices
• Additional material which is relevant to the research and is referred in
the text. E.g. if you have made a questionnaire, you can put the form
into appendix.

• No chapter numbers, but enumerate the appendixes (Appendix A, Ap-

pendix B,...). If you have only one appendix, then just “Appendix”.

5.1.7 Examples of master’s theses

A new application or method
Now a new application (a program) is in central role. However, it has to be
related to the existing research and evaluated.

• Introduction: the problem

• Background theory and main concepts

• Related research (other existing solutions to the same or similar prob-

lems)

• Your own application

• Evaluation: comparison to other methods, empirical tests, or theoreti-

cal analysis

• Conclusions
88 CHAPTER 5. WRITING MASTER’S THESIS

Literature review
A theory or a model is analyzed based on literature. Often a comparison of
different approaches.

Your own contribution: how the results are described in a uniform manner,
analyzed and compared.

Now the existing litertaure is referred in all chapters, no need for a separate
chapter “Related research”.
• Introduction
• Main concepts
• Approaches + their analysis (2-3 chapters)
• Or a chapter for comparison and analysis of all approaches
• Conclusions
Variation: analysis of the suitablity of existing approaches to a new problem.
• Introduction
• The new problem + criteria for an ideal solution method
• Potential solution methods + analysis of their suitability (2-3 chapters)
• Possibly discussion (comparison, new solution ideas)
• Conclusions

Empirical research
E.g. a new method or tool is tested with real users or products of students
are analyzed.
• Introduction: Begin by introducing the research problem: what was
the goal of empirical study.
• Main concepts and background theories (one chapter) and
• Related research (one chapter) (or both in one chapter)
• Experiment and results (one chapter), e.g. four sections: Material,
Methods, Results, and Discussion
• Conclusions: what was the probem, what results were achieved
5.2. MASTER’S THESIS PROCESS 89

5.2 Master’s thesis process

“The purpose of a thesis is to train the mind of the writer and to show how
far it has been trained.” [1, 141]

5.2.1 Reading literature

Problem: you should get a wide view of the existing research on the topic,
but your time to search and read literature is limited!

• Try to find the most relevant articles.

• To get a wider perspective, search papares by different authors/research

groups. If there are several approaches to solve or study the problem,
try to study something from all of them (or all of the main approaches).

• Use several digital libraries or bibliographies for searching – one collec-

tion may be biassed.

• Plan how much time you can spend for studying literature! In some
point you have to stop collecting new material and begin to write.
→ Suggestion: In the end of Aug, your it-project is finished and you
have collected and selected relevant material for your thesis.

5.2.2 Planning
Well planned is halfly done!

• Begin by brainstorming. Draw concept maps. Discuss with your friends

or supervisors. Write down all ideas which come into your mind.

• Collect literature and scan through it. Select the most important
sources.

• Try to write the disposition as early as possible. Process it with your

supervisor until it looks good (logical structure and order).

• List the main research problems (in the form of questions) and write
the introductory paragraphs for the chapters.
90 CHAPTER 5. WRITING MASTER’S THESIS

5.2.3 Difficulty to get started

Hints:

• Arrange a comfortable working place. Reserve time for writing every

day. Try to make writing a routine for you!

• Set deadlines. Preferrably fix them with your supervisor – it is always

more effective.

• Work together with your friend. You can set the deadlines, discuss your
topics, and read each other’s texts. After good work you can reward
yourself by doing something fun.

• Imagine that you are writing to your friend about your research topic!

• Summarize articles you have read. It is never waste of time – at least

you learn!

• Begin to write immediately, when your disposition is finished.

• Write down ideas when they come – even in the middle of night.

• Invent good examples and write them down.

• If some part is difficult to write, beging from an easier one. Write the
difficult parts, when you are in a good working mood.

• Draw figures which describe the some method or model and write a
description.

• Try to divide the problem or phenomenon into subproblems or parts

and describe them separately.

• Collect main concepts and write definitions for them. Fix the notations.

How to write the beginning of chapters?

• Look at the opening sentences of similar compositions by other people

• Begin, for example, with a summary, a statement of the problem, a

hypothesis, necessary and interesting background information, a new
idea, an accepted procedure (then explain advantages of another pro-
cedure), ...
5.2. MASTER’S THESIS PROCESS 91

• Don’t spend too much time trying to find an effective beginning – you
can always modify it afterwards.

• Go straight to the point and, if possible, refer to things that you expect
your readers to know (vs. contructivism).

5.2.4 Revising
“The time taken in planning, writing and revising is time for thought. It is
well spent, for when the work is complete your understanding of the subject
will have been improved.” [1, 44]

• First of all, admit that the first draft(s) is not perfect! Ask criticts and
respect it. Good criticts is really valuable.

• If possible, ask at least two people to read your thesis. Preferrably

one who is an expert on the subject, and one who is not. E.g. your
supervisor and one of student colleagues.

• You can write and revise your work for ever, but in some point you
have to stop! One trick is that you don’t allow yourself to gather any
more new literature.

• Have a break when your work is finished. At least, sleep one night
before revising the text yourself.

Technical hints:

• Read text aloud and check if it sounds well.

• Check all references. Especially, are names correctly spelled?

• Save old versions, you may need them afterwards.

5.2.5 Technical notes

Technical terms
If there is no widely accepted definition for it, then
1. Tell whose definition you follow and give this definition with reference,
or

2. Give a definition yourself and tell that in this work the term is defined
as given.
92 CHAPTER 5. WRITING MASTER’S THESIS

“If a technical term is used as a substitute for an explanation, it gives no

more than an impression of knowledge. ... Unless a technical term can be
defined clearly and then used with accuracy and precision, it may conceal
our ignorance and obscure the need for further research, and it should have
no place in scientific writing.” [1, 62]

Symbols
• Don’t use the same symbol for different things!

• Try to use also indexes in a uniform manner. E.g. if the i = 1, ..., n

is the number of rows and j = 1, ..., k the number of attributes in one
place, don’t change them in another place.

• If some special notation is widely used in literature, follow it.

• If different sources use different notations, harmonize them. (Fix one

notation and translate all notations to your own ”language”.)

• Do not use Greek (or Hebrew) letters if there is no reason. If there is

a danger of confusion e.g. with values of variables, then Greek letters
are justified.

Equations
Avoid listing mathematical equations! Try to integrate equations into sen-
tences so that the results is readable.

Do not replace words by mathematical symbols (e.g. ∀) in the text.

Chapter 6

LATEXinstructions and exercises

6.1 Why latex?

Latex is a description language for writing documents in a html-manner –
just much richer!

Latex files are pure text files (ASCII), which can be compiled to dvi (device
independent format), pdf (portable document format), ps (postscript) or
something else. The modifications become visible only after compilation.

• System-independent, portable format for text documents with all mod-

ifications, equations, tables, etc.

• Can be transformed to several other text formats

• Especially easy to write mathematical equations and special characters

• Good-looking results!

• References to figures, tables, equations, sections, literature sources etc.

can be managed automatically. E.g. the order of figures can be changed
and the references to figures are updated automatically.

• Supports bibtex, a tool for automatic management of literature sources

and references

– Lists in References only the sources actually referred. → You can

collect all literature references you ever need into one database (a
bibliography).

93
94 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

– Writes the publication details in the desired style (order, font,

punctuation, etc.). The style can be changed by changing just
one parameter.
– Similarly the reference codes are generated automatically accord-
ing to the selected style. → Easy to change from numbers to letter
abbreviations or full names with years.
– Arranges the literature sources according to the style (alphabetic
order of abbreviations, numeric order, etc.)
– Publication details in bibtex format are often available in Internet,
but you can also write them yourself.

• You can easily make your own macros (commands) for special purposes.

• Several ready-made style packages available, e.g. for writing algorithms.

• Latex is free!

6.2 Latex commands

The basic form of latex commands is the following:

\command[options]{parameter}

Options and sometimes also the parameter can be missing. Examples:

• \section{Introduction} begins a new section called Introduction.

The section title is given as a parameter and no options are used.

• \emph{trigger} emphasizes word ”trigger” (writes in italics, trigger).

• {\em trigger} an abbreviation for the previous. Now the scope of

the command is defined by braces { and }.

• \includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{figure1.eps} includes
figure ”figure1.eps” into the document. The option defines the width
of the figure to be 60% of the text width. Note that \textwidth is a
command without parameters. The width option is optional.

Special commands \begin{something} and \end{something} are always

used in pairs. The parameter defines what kind of element is included be-
tween them. Examples:
6.3. BASIC LATEX 95

• \begin{document} \end{document} defines the beginning and end

of a document. The latex file contains usually some general commands
(e.g. includes style packages, defines the document type and the lan-
guage, etc.) before the beginning of the document. → Appendix A.
• \begin{itemize} \end{itemize} defines a bullet list.
• \begin{tabular}{ll} \end{tabular} defines a table with two columns,
the items are aligned to the left (l).
• \begin{figure}[!h] \end{figure} defines a figure environment,
where the figure can be inserted with the caption and a label for refer-
ring. Option !h forces the figure to be placed here (where the command
is given) if possible, but it is optional.
• \begin{center} \end{center} places the next element (e.g. a figure
or a table) into the center.

6.3 Basic latex

6.3.1 Instructions
1. Boot the computer in Linux.
2. Create a dircetory, e.g. mkdir sciwri and move there by cd sciwri.
3. Start a browser and save file
http://cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/basiclatex.tex
into your directory.
4. Check what a latex file looks like by less basiclatex.tex.
5. Compile the file by latex basiclatex.tex. The resulting file is basiclatex.dvi.
(You can always check the contents of the directory by ls or ls -la.)
6. Now you can look it by xdvi basiclatex.dvi.
7. If you want to print the document, transform it to postcript by dvips
basiclatex.dvi -o basiclatex.ps. If you prefer pdf, use transfor-
mation dvipdfm basiclatex.dvi.
8. Use basiclatex.tex as you example, and write your own latex file
where you solve the following tasks. You can copy the basiclatex.tex
and just modufy it. Copying happens by cp basiclatex.tex latexercise.tex
(you can invent the name yourself, just remember the suffix .tex).
96 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

9. Open your file in an editor. For example, you can use emacs or
xemacs. xemacs is heavier to run, but maybe easier to use, if you
are used to graphical interphase. In emacs, the file is opened by emacs
latexercise.tex.

10. When you finish, you can transfer your file to cs, where it can be
accessed from windows, if needed. The command is
scp latexercise.tex [email protected]:directory, where user
is your username and directory is the directory name.

6.3.2 Exercises
Give your document title ”Exercises 1” and create a section for each task.

1. Writing lists: Write the following list

• Understanding domain
• Preprocessing data
• Learning the model from data
• Interpreting the results

Can you add a sublist into your list?

• Understanding domain
• Preprocessing data
• Learning the model from data
– Data mining or
– Machine learning step
• Interpreting the results

2. Write the following table

Data Mining Machine Learning

Assumptions: Data primarly Model primarly
Model: Often local Global
patterns
Data size: even millions of hundreds or
rows thoudans of rows
6.4. WRITING EQUATIONS AND SPECIAL SYMBOLS BY LATEX 97

Table 6.1: Useful mathematical symbols: arrows.

→ An arrow to the right
← An arrow to the left
↔ An arrow to both directions
⇒ A double line arrow to the right
⇐ A double arrow to the left
⇔ An double arrow to both directions

3. A proper table should have a title and be referred from the text. Ta-
ble 6.1 gives an example. Check from http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/
pages/whamalai/sciwri/articletemplate.tex how it is done!
Write Table 6.2 yourself!

Table 6.2: Welknown N P -complete problems.

Name Problem
Satifiability (SAT) Given a Boolean formula of variables, parantheses,
and connectives ∧ (and), ∨ (or), and ¬ (not),
can the formula be true with any truth value
assignment?
Independent set (IS) Does the given undirected graph contain k
vertices which are not connected to each other?
Clique Does the given undirected graph contain k vertices
which are all connected to each other?
Hamiltonian cycle (HC) Does an undirceted graph contain a path which goes
through all vertices exactly once and returns to the starting
point?

6.4 Writing equations and special symbols by

Latex
1. Write the following expressions by latex.
a) (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2
b) (a − b)(a + b) = a2 − b2
c) n! = 1 × 2 × ... × n
98 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

d) a = v/t
(n+1)×n
e) 1 + 2 + ... + n = 2

2. $, %, #, and are special characters in latex, and you cannot use them
in the text as such. Can you find out how to do it? Hint: an escape
character \.

3. Write the following mathematical expressions. You can find instruc-

tions here:
http://www.ift.uib.no/Fysisk/Teori/KURS/WRK/TeX/symALL.html

(a) A = {a1 , a2 , ..., an }

(b) ai ∈ A for all i = 1, ..., n
(c) B ⊆ A
(d) |B| ≤ |A|
(e) (ai ∈ B) ⇒ (ai ∈ A)
(f) C = A ∪ {b}
(g) |C| 6= |A|

4. Here is a list of useful mathematical symbols. Write mathematical ex-

pressions, where you use them! Remember to use the math mode! You
can find more symbols in the latex manual.

R \mathbb{R}
P \mathcal{P}
∅ \emptyset
∞ \infty
x \overline{x}
n
k
n \atopk
... \ldots
..
. \vdots
¡n¢
For example, k
is achieved by

$\left( n \atop k \right)$

5. Write the following definition using the definiton environment!

6.5. WRITING REFERENCES 99

Definition 1 (Multiple linear regression) Let X = {X1 , ...., Xk }

and Y be numerical variables, where Y is linearly dependent on Xi s
and Xi s are linearly independent from each other. Then for all x =
(x1 , ..., xk ) ∈ Dom(X) the expected value of Y given X = x, ŷ, is
defined by linear equation
ŷ = α + β1 x1 + β2 x2 + ... + βk xk ,
in which α and β1 , ..., βk are real-valued regression coefficients.

6.5 Writing references

The references are listed in the end of document. The title is generated
automatically. In the article style, the reference list is labelled ”References”;
in the report style, it is labelled ”Bibliography.”
The literature sources are defined in the following kind of list:

\begin{thebibliography}{4}
\bibitem{assrule} Agrawal, R., Mannila, H., et al.:
Fast discovery of association rules.
In Fayyad, U.M., Piatetsky-Shapiro, G.,P., Smyth, P., Uthurasamy, R. (eds.):
Advances in knowledge dicovery and data mining.
AAAI/MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA (1996) 307--328
\bibitem{boulay} Boulay, B. du:
Can We Learn from ITSs?
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2000) 9--17
\bibitem{butz} Butz, C.J., Hua, S., Maguire, R.B.:
Web-based intelligent tutoring system for computer programming. Web
Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal 4,
1 (2006) To appear.
\end{thebibliography}
1. Compile the template (http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/
sciwri/articletamplate.tex) and check what the list looks like!
2. The reference notations are defined in the header by command
\bibliographystyle{style}.Style alpha is often used in the cs mas-
ter’s thesis. Check what happens if you change the style to plain!
3. Referring to sources, like to [AM96], happens by \citecommand. Try
to refer to other sources! Notice that you have to run latex command
a couple of times, before all references are solved.
100 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

4. Search at least two useful articles in ACM or IEEE digital libraries

related to your topic! These libraries can be found in Finelib, see
instructions
http://cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/material.htm.
5. Write the references into a bibliography list. Write some example sen-
tences and test that you can refer to the sources.

6.6 Including figures into a latex document

The figures should be postscript files. To test the following examples, load
the file cat.ps from http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/
cat.ps. Store it to the same directory as your latex document (you can mod-
ify template http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/ articletamplate.
tex). If you want to use another directory, you have to specify the path also in
the figure. E.g. if the file is in a subdirectory ”figures”, \includegraphicsgets
parameter {figures/cat.ps}.
If you don’t refer to the figure, you can simply include it here like this:

1. Test how to include cat.ps into your own document! What happens if
you remove commands \begin{quotation} and \end{quotation} ?
2. In scientific text, all figures must have a title (caption) and be referred
from the text. This is demonstrated in Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1 is aligned in the center. The figure width is defined to be
60% of the text width. Try what happens if you change it!
3. Load file articletree.eps from
http://cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/articletree.eps.
6.7. DRAWING FIGURES 101

Figure 6.1: A cat writing scientific text.

Include the figure into your document. Write some caption, invent a
label, and test referring to it!

6.7 Drawing figures

In these exercises we will parctise to use xfig tool for drawing figures. Xfig is
available in cs and Linux. It is very easy to learn by trying, but you can find
more information by command man xfig or you can search manual pages in
the net (keywords: xfig manual).

6.7.1 Advices
• You can start xfig from shell by command xfig (when the file doesn’t
have any name) or you can already give it a name by command xfig
example.fig. If you didn’t give any file name in the beginning, you
have to save your figure by command save as.

• Click grid mode and select a grid. Now it is easier to draw objects
into positions you want.

• When you are finishing, remember to save your file. (You can save it
during drawing, too. If something goes wrong, you can continue from
the last saved version.)
102 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

• In edit menu there is command undo which lets you cancel the last
drawing operation.

• By default, you cannot draw or move objects anywhere, but only in the
grid. If this is too restricting, you can select Point position → Any.

• When you finish, save the figure as postscrip by selecting command

Export from file menu. The default is encapsulated postscript and
the file name will be example.eps (if your original file was example.fig).

6.7.2 Tasks
1. Draw some of the given figures by xfig, save them as eps. Check the
eps figures by command ghostview example.eps or gv example.eps.
Notice: your figures do not have to be indentical than the examples!

2. Load figure articletree.fig from http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/

whamalai/sciwri/articletree.fig. Open it in xfig and make your
own changes. Save the file and import it as an eps file.

3. Draw figures you need for your own Sciwri paper!

4. Extra task (if you have time): test how to include latex math com-
mands into a figure in xfig. Write the math commands (inside $ char-
acters) into your figure. Select Edit command and click the string
which contains latex symbols. Change the Special Flag to Special.
When you export the figure select language Combined PS/Latex (both
parts). This produces two files example.pstex and example.pstex t
into your working directory. Include the latter into your document by
\input{example.pstex_t}as demonstrated in

6.8 Spell checking

Test aspell tool for spell checking. Notice that aspell is a newer (and
better) tool than ispell. In our systems, the default language seems to be
American English, but you can change it to British English.

• If you run aspell from emacs, select the dictionary from tools →
spell checking → select British dict. Start checking by select-
ing Spell-Check Buffer from the same menu. You get the list of
commands by ctrl-h.
6.8. SPELL CHECKING 103

+, − d
q0 q1 q2 d

x1 . . y1

x2 . . y2

. y3

Serial episode Parallel episode

A
A B
B

1. Understanding domain

2. Preprocessing data

3. Discovering patterns

4. Postprocessing results

5. Application

Figure 6.2: Example figures

104 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

• If you run ispell from command line, give option -d british.multi.

Test aspell with file its.tex http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/

sciwri/its.tex and correct it according to British English!

The aspell manual pages: http://aspell.sourceforge.net/man-html/index.

html

6.9 Writing references by bibtex

BibTeX is both a program and a file format for managing your literature
references automatically.

6.9.1 Idea
• You collect a database of bibtex records (bibtex entries) for all sources
you may refer in your document. It can contain also extra entries,
because the bibtex selects only those references which are actually re-
ferred.

• The bibtex entries look like the following:

@article{Gettys90,
author = ”J. Gettys and P. Karlton and S. McGregor”,
title = ”The X Window System, Version 11”,
journal = ”Software Practice and Experience”,
volume = ”20”,
number = ”2”,
year = ”1990”,
}

• Each bibtex entry should have a unique label (above Gettys90). The
labels are referred in the text normally by \cite{label}.

• The resulting database is a common text file, and only the reocrds
have a special format. The file should be called <file name>.bib. For
example, dbase.bib.

• You include the database into your document by commands

\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{dbase}
6.9. WRITING REFERENCES BY BIBTEX 105

(The first command defines just the style.)

• When you compile the latex document, you have to run bibtex too.
latex document.tex
bibtex document
latex document
The first command is a normal latex compilation. Command bibtex
generates a file called document.bbl. It is similar to a latex bibliogra-
phy list, but it contains only those sources which are actually referred
in your document. The last command includes the references into your
document and the resulting document.dvi file is ready.

6.9.2 Bibtex entries

Often you can found the bibtex entries ready typed in the net. However,
sometimes they are erroneous and you should be able to check that they are
correct. Sometimes you have to write the bibtex entries yourself.

6.9.3 Searching bibtex entries

• Bibtex entries can be find in many digital libraries (e.g. ACM, citeseer)
with the article.
• DBLP Computer Science bibliography (http://www.informatik.uni-trier.
de/∼ley/db/index.html) contains a large collection of bibtex entries!
• You can make a google search using the authors, paper name and word
”bibtex” as keywords.

Writing bibtex entries

When you write the bibtex entries, you should first decide what type of source
you have. The most common types are:

• a journal paper → @article

• a conference paper → @inproceedings

• a book → @book

Other types:
106 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

• a chapter or a section in a book by one author → @inbook

• a chapter in a book (a collection) which is written by several authors

→ @incollection

• a master thesis → @mastersthesis

• a dosctoral thesis → @phdthesis

• a technical report → @techreport

• other: see http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/∼jacobsd/bib/formats/

bibtex.html

When the type is fixed, you should define all required fields. The most often
needed fields are:

• author

• title (the title of a paper or book)

• journal (the journal name)

• booktitle (if the paper belongs to a book or collection, and already has
a title of its own. Especially, the name of the conference proceedings.)

• year (the publication year)

• pages

• volume (in journals, also if a book has several volumes, and the volumes
in LNCS series)

• number (the issue number of a journal or the number of a technical

report)

• editor (if a book or a collection has editors)

• publisher (the publisher’s name)

• address (the publisher’s address, not necessary, or the address of an

institution. Notice. just the city + country.)

• institution (the sponsoring institution of a technical report, often a

department + university)
6.10. WRITING ALGORITHMS IN LATEX 107

• Other fields: see standard fields in http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/

∼jacobsd/bib/formats/bibtex.html

Note: By default, Bibtex capitalizes only the first letter of the first word in
the titles. If you need other capital letters, you have two choices:
1. Put the letter or letters to be capitalized into braces, e.g.

title=’’Using {B}ayesian student models in intelligent

tutoring systems’’

2. Put the whole field value into braces. Now you don’t need the quotation
marks at all:

title={Using Bayesian student models in intelligent

tutoring systems}

Notes:
• Journal and book names are usually written such that the first letter
of each word is capitalized!
• Remember all the commas and quotation marks! Otherwise bibtex
cannot parse the entry. The most common error is a missing quotation
mark or a comma in the end of field.
• In DBLP the entry is often in two separate records: one for the whole
proceeding and one for the article. The article entry does not contain
all fields alone, but it refers to the collection by field crossref and
inherits all fields from it. → copy both entries into your database or
add the missing fields to the article entry.

6.9.4 Exercise
Search or write the bibtex entries for your literature sources. Test that the
bibtex can generate all references! (Now it is important that you also refer
to your sources in the text.)

6.10 Writing algorithms in latex

6.10.1 Instructions
The latex source file of this subsection is available on http://www.cs.joensuu.
fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/algexample.tex.
108 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

Using algorithm library

New commands for algorithm environment are defined in package algorithmwh.sty.
It can be loaded from http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/
algorithmwh.sty. Save it to your working directory. In addition, you have
to include two other packages (float and xspace) in the header. Thus, add
the following lines to the header of your latex document:

\usepackage{float}
\usepackage{xspace}
\usepackage{algorithmwh}

Notes
• You can add your own commands to algorithmwh.sty by \newcommand.
Suggestion: rename the style file according to you, if you make changes
to it.

• Line numbers are useful, if you refer to certain lines in your code. Begin
each code line by \uln. If you don’t need line numbers, drop \uln.

• You have to specify the spaces explicitely by \>.

• Fix the style you use for assignments. There are several alternatives:
x = y, x ← y, x := y.

• Logical bit-operations \uor, \uxor, \uand, \unot require math mode

($ ’s), e.g. x | y is achieved by

$x \uor y$

Example (a text extract)

The basic idea of the algorithm (Alg. 2) is following:

1. Search connected components from graph G by depth-first search. This

can be completed in time Θ(|V | + |E|) (See section Analysis.) Let
the resulting vertex set be V 0 ⊆ V , and the corresponding undirected
subgraph G0 = (V 0 , E 0 ).

2. For each connected component search self-referring groups from G0 by

depth-first search (Alg. 3).
6.10. WRITING ALGORITHMS IN LATEX 109

Alg. 2 SelfReferringSets(G, minf ). An algorithm for searching all strongly

self-referring sets in graph G = (V, E).
Input: G = (V, E), minf
Output: Y ⊆ V

1 begin
2 compute all connected components in G = (V, E)
3 for each connected component V 0 in G = (V, E) do
4 for all v ∈ V 0 dfs({v}, degree(v), minf , v)
5 end

Alg. 3 dfs(X, d, minf , last). A depth-first search of the self-referent sets in

subgraph G0 = (V 0 , E 0 ).
Input: X ⊆ V, d, minf , last
Output: Y ⊆ V 0

1 begin
2 if fref (X) ≥ minf then
3 output X
d(1−minf )
4 else if (fref (X) < 1 − (|X|−1)min f
)
5 then return // search failed
0
6 for all vertices u ∈ V (u > last and ∃v ∈ X (v, u) ∈ E) do
7 dfs(X ∪ {u}, d, minf , u)
8 end

6.10.2 Exercises
1. Write Algorithm 4! Test how to refer to it in the text (like here).

2. Test how to write the following kind of method using an itemize list!

Step 1 x = x + 1
Step 2 y = x2 + 1
Step 3 If y ≤ n return to Step 1.

3. Write an algorithm or a method to your paper!

110 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

Alg. 4 PartitioningClustering(S, n, k)
Input: Data set S, n = |S|, number of clusters k
Output: Centroids c1 , ..., ck

1 begin
2 Select randomly k data points p1 , ..., pk ∈ S
3 for all pi // Initialization
4 begin
5 ci = pi
6 Ci = {pi }
7 end
8 while (not converged) // Update clusters
9 begin
10 for all pi ∈ S
11 begin
12 Search cj such that d(pi , cj ) is minimal
13 Cj = Cj ∪ {pi }
14 end
15 Update centroids ci
16 end
17 end

6.11 Special latex notes

6.11.1 No numbers to sections or sections
If you do not want to output section or section numbers (like in this doc-
ument) use ’*’ after the command, e.g. \subsection*{title}. This is not
recommended in master thesis, but you can maybe need it in some special
cases.

6.11.2 Other symbols or item names to lists

If you want to use other symbols that bullets in an itemize list, you can
define new symbols or item names in \itemcommand like \item[a] and
\item[Step1] . See example:

\begin{itemize}
\item[Step 1] $x=x+1$
\item[Step 2] $y=x^2+1$
 6.11. SPECIAL LATEX NOTES 111

\item[Step 3] If $y \leg n$ return Step 1.

\end{itemize}

outputs

Step 1 x = x + 1

Step 2 y = x2 + 1

Step 3 If y ≤ n return Step 1.

6.11.3 Footnotes
Footnotes1 are achieved by command \footnote{text}.

6.11.4 Font size

Font size can be enlarged or shrunk by special commands
\Huge \LARGE \Large \tiny
\footnotesize

etc. See latex manual! E.g. if your table contains a lot of text, first try to
prune the text, but if it doesn’t help, you can use footnote size:

\begin{center}
\begin{table}[!h]
\caption{plaa-plaa}
\label{tab1:3}
\footnotesize{
\begin{tabular}

\end{tabular}
}
\end{table}
\end{center}

6.11.5 Multi-column tables

If you want to get a table, where some columns are divided into subcolumns
on some rows but united in others, you can use command \multicolumn.
This command requires package multicol. Include it in the header by com-
mand \usepackage{multicol}.
112 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

Table 6.3: Comparison of prediction accuracy of LR and NB models. The

prediction accuracy is expressed true positive T P and true negative T N
rates. All models have been evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation and the
classification rates have been averaged.
Model structure LR rates N B rates
TP TN TP TN
A ⇒ F R1 0.83 0.47 0.96 0.31
A, B ⇒ F R1 0.91 0.72 0.80 0.81
A, B, C ⇒ F R1 0.93 0.81 0.83 0.81
T P 1 ⇒ F R2 0.70 0.68 0.96 0.53
T P 1, D ⇒ F R2 0.78 0.84 0.76 0.61
T P 1, D, E ⇒ F R2 0.76 0.89 0.82 0.87
T P 1, D, E, F ⇒ F R2 0.70 0.92 0.80 0.87

See the following example:

\begin{table}[!h]
\begin{center}
\caption{Comparison of prediction accuracy of {\em LR} and {\em NB} models.
The prediction accuracy is expressed
true positive $TP$ and true negative $TN$ rates.
All models have been evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation and the
classification rates have been averaged.}
\label{crossval}
\begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
Model structure&\multicolumn{2}{|l|}{$LR$ rates} &
\multicolumn{2}{|l|}{$NB$ rates}\\
& TP& TN& TP&TN\\
\hline
$A \Rightarrow FR1$ &0.83&0.47&0.96&0.31\\
\hline
$A,B \Rightarrow FR1$ &0.91&0.72&0.80&0.81\\
\hline
$A,B,C \Rightarrow FR1$ &0.93&0.81&0.83&0.81\\
\hline
$TP1 \Rightarrow FR2 $&0.70&0.68&0.96&0.53\\
1
These not recommended in computer science texts; use them sparsely!
6.11. SPECIAL LATEX NOTES 113

\hline
$TP1,D \Rightarrow FR2 $&0.78&0.84&0.76&0.61\\
\hline
$TP1,D,E \Rightarrow FR2$&0.76&0.89&0.82&0.87\\
\hline
$TP1,D,E,F \Rightarrow FR2$&0.70&0.92&0.80&0.87\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}

Notice that you have to define the maximum number of columns in the
tabular definition, and multicolumn is used to combine columns on some
rows.

6.11.6 Sideway tables

If the table is very large, using footnote size doesn’t help enough. In this case,
you can allign the table horizontally by commands \begin{sidewaystable}and
\end{sidewaystable} instead of \begin{table}and \end{table}. These
commands demand that you include package rotating. Add to the header
line \usepackage{rotating}.

\begin{sidewaystable}
\begin{center}
\caption{Table caption}
\label{predmodels}
\footnotesize{
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|l|l|}

\end{tabular}
}
\end{center}
\end{sidewaystable}

6.11.7 Special letters

In foreign names, you need sometimes special letters. E.g. Scandinavian
letters ä and ö are achieved by {\"a} and {\"o}; á by {\’a} and à by
{\‘a}.
114 CHAPTER 6. LATEXINSTRUCTIONS AND EXERCISES

6.11.8 Removing extra spaces

After a full stop, latex writes always a longer space, because it interpretes it
as an end of sentence. However, if you need full stops inside a sentence, e.g.
in an abbreviation, this is not desirable. It is recommended that after each
such pseudo-full stop you define the space explicitely by a slash \(and drop
the space from text):

E.g.\ tigers, lynxes, and lions are cat animals.

In the article (and master thesis) template the default is that all paragraphs
begin by space. This is unconvienent when you just want to leave empty
lines without beginning new paragraphs. You can get rid of the beginning
space by command \noindent.
For example:

’’The associated probabilities are

\noindent
$a \rightarrow action1$ $(0.6)$ $a \rightarrow action2$ $(0.4)$\\
$b \rightarrow action3$ $(0.6)$ $b \rightarrow action2$ $(0.4)$\\
$c \rightarrow action3$ $(0.6)$ $c \rightarrow action2$ $(0.4)$’’\\

outputs

”The associated probabilities are

a → action1 (0.6) a → action2 (0.4)
b → action3 (0.6) b → action2 (0.4)
c → action3 (0.6) c → action2 (0.4)”

6.11.9 Adding extra spaces

The latex doesn’t consider how many spaces you have written in the text
file – it outputs always just one space. To get assitional spaces, you have to
define them explicitely by c̃haracter.
If you need more space (either horizontal or vertical) you can define it by
commands \vspace{2cm}(vertical space of 2 cm) and \hspace{13mm} (a hor-
izontal space of 13mm).
Chapter 7

Appendices

Appendix A: A simple latex template

%This is a really simple latex template for writing your first articles

%The paper size, font size and document type are defined in the following
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}

%Uncomment the following line, if you write in Finnish (special characters)

%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

%The following line is not necessary if you write in English. If you write
%in another language, uncomment the line and change the language
%\usepackage[english]{babel}

%useful special symbols:

\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{latexsym}

%a useful package if you write url addresses:

\usepackage{url}

%a package for figures:

\usepackage[dvips]{color}
\usepackage{epsfig}

%Bibliography style. The alpha style generates references with

%first letters and year. If you prefer numbers, use style plain.

115
116 CHAPTER 7. APPENDICES

\bibliographystyle{alpha}

%Create your own environments

\newtheorem{definition}{Definition}
\newtheorem{example}{Example}

%If you want to remove the space before paragraphs uncomment the following.
%Remember then to leave an empty line between paragraphs!
%\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

\title{The main title}

\author{Your name}

%Uncomment the following, if you don’t want the date to be printed

%\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\section{The title of the first main section}

Write section 1 here.

\section{The title of the second main section}

You can write an introductory paragraph here, before subsections.

However, remember use introductory paragraphs systematically: either
everywhere or nowhere.

\subsection{The title of the first subsection}

Write subsection 2.1 here.

\subsection{The title of the second subsection}

Write subsection 2.2 here.

 117

\subsection{The title of the second subsection}

Write subsection 2.3 here.

\section{The title of the third main section}

You can divide this into subsection, too. Etc.

\end{document}
118 CHAPTER 7. APPENDICES

Appendix B: A latex template for articles

%This is a basic latex template for writing articles like
%course papers, program documents, etc.
% http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/articletemplate.tex

%The paper size, font size and document type are defined in the following
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}

%Uncomment the following line, if you write in Finnish (special characters)

%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

%The following line is not necessary if you write in English. If you write
%in another language, uncomment the line and change the language
%\usepackage[english]{babel}

%useful special symbols:

\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{latexsym}

%a useful package if you write url addresses:

\usepackage{url}

%a package for figures:

\usepackage[dvips]{color}
\usepackage{epsfig}

%Bibliography style. The alpha style generates references with

%first letters and year. If you prefer numbers, use style plain.
\bibliographystyle{alpha}

%Create your own environments

\newtheorem{definition}{Definition}
\newtheorem{example}{Example}

%If you want to remove the space before paragraphs uncomment the following.
%Remember then to leave an empty line between paragraphs!
%\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
 119

\title{The main title}

\author{Your name}

%Uncomment the following, if you don’t want the date to be printed

%\date{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\section{References}

The references are listed in the end of document. The title is

generated automatically. In the article style, the reference list is
labelled "References"; in the report style, it is labelled
"Bibliography."

The reference notations are defined in the header by command\\

\verb \bibliographystyle{style}. Style alpha is often used in cs master
thesis. If you prefer numbers, use style plain.

Referring to sources, like to \cite{boulay}, happens by \verb \cite command.

Try to refer to other sources! Notice that you have to run latex
command a couple of times, before all references are solved.

\section{Referred tables}

We have already practised how to make simple tables. Now we will make
tables, like Table \ref{tableexample} which have titles and are referred
from the text.

\begin{table}[!h]
\begin{center}
\caption{Useful mathematical symbols: arrows.}
\label{tableexample}
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
\hline
$\rightarrow$ & An arrow to the right\\
\hline
120 CHAPTER 7. APPENDICES

$\leftarrow$ & An arrow to the left\\

\hline
$\leftrightarrow$ & An arrow to both directions\\
\hline
$\Rightarrow$ & A double line arrow to the right\\
\hline
$\Leftarrow$ & A double arrow to the left\\
\hline
$\Leftrightarrow$ & An double arrow to both directions\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}

Table \ref{tableexample} is aligned in the center. Option !h tries to

force the figure as near to the given location (between this and
the previous paragraph) as possible. If the position does not look good,
you can remove the option (especially with large figures and tables).

\section{Figures}

The figures should be postscript files. To test the following

examples, load the file cat.ps from
\url{http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/pages/whamalai/sciwri/cat.ps}. Store it to
the same directory as this document. If you want to use another
directory, you have to specify the path also in the figure. E.g.\ if
the file is in a subdirectory ’’figures’’, \verb \includegraphics gets
parameter \verb {figures/cat.ps}. ~

If you don’t refer to the figure, you can simply include it here like this:

\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{cat.ps}
\end{center}

In scientific text, all figures must have a title (caption) and be

referred from the text. This is demonstrated in Figure
\ref{figexample}.
 121

\begin{figure}[!h]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{cat.ps}
\caption{A cat writing scientific text.}
\label{figexample}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

Figure \ref{figexample} is aligned in the center.

The figure width is defined to be 60\%
of the text width. Try what happens if you change it!

% Literature references:
% If you use bibtex, uncomment the following. Add the name of your
% own bibtex database instead of dbase (now file dbase.bib)
%\bibliography{dbase}

% If you don’t use bibtex, the literature sources are defined in

% the following list. If you use bibtex, delete the list
\begin{thebibliography}{4}
\bibitem{assrule} Agrawal, R., Mannila, H., et al.:
Fast discovery of association rules.
In Fayyad, U.M., Piatetsky-Shapiro, G.,P., Smyth, P., Uthurasamy, R. (eds.):
Advances in knowledge dicovery and data mining.
AAAI/MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA (1996) 307--328
\bibitem{boulay} Boulay, B. du:
Can We Learn from ITSs?
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2000) 9--17
\bibitem{butz} Butz, C.J., Hua, S., Maguire, R.B.:
Web-based intelligent tutoring system for computer programming. Web
Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal 4,
1 (2006) To appear.
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}
 A check list for the master’s thesis.
Fill this table when a draft version of your master thesis is finished. You can fill the table yourself but it is better if somebody else can fill it
for you!
Property Questions Comments
CHAPTER 7. APPENDICES

Research What is the main problem? Is it clearly

problem stated? Does it go through the whole thesis?
Solution Does the thesis solve what it promises?
How the problem is solved? Is the solution
valid?
General What are the main parts? Is the division
structure to chapters and sections logical and balanced?
Text Should some section, paragraph or sentence be
structure removed or changed?
Details Do tables, figures, algorithms, definitions,
equations, examples, and other details support
the presentation? Does the reader understand
their meaning?
Specification Are parallel parts written in the same
level specification level? Are some parts written in
too specific or general level? Is the level suitable
for the topic and readers?
Writing Is the presentation clear, understandable, and
style exact? Does it proceed fluently? Are there any
frequent problems?
Labelling Do the chapter, section, and subsection titles
correpond to contents? Do the figure and table
captions describe their contents?
Introduction Does the introduction tell all essential things?
Does it rise the reader’s interest?
Conclusions Do conclusions contain both a compact summary
122
and evaluation of the results and their meaning?
Literature Are the sources relevant? Is the amount of
sources satisfactory? Are they referred correctly
in the text?
 View publication stats

Bibliography

[1] Barrass, R.: Scientists must write. A guide to better writing for scientists,
engineers and students. Chapman and Hall, London, New York, 1978.

[2] Peat, J. et al.: Scientific writing – easy when you know how. BMJ Books,
London, 2002.

[3] Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Fifth Edi-

tion. American Psychological Association, Washington DC, 2002.

[4] Strunk, W.: Elements of Style. Priv. print, Ithaca, NY, 1918. On-line
edition published July 1999 by Bartleby.com. www.bartleby.com/141/.
Loaded 1.3. 2006.

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