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Tangential but has it became popular to use titles for academic papers like this: [a clever pun]: [generic short description] I've seen a few AI papers that ar
by ducktective 4y ago
Tangential but has it became popular to use titles for academic papers like this: [a clever pun]: [generic short description]
I've seen a few AI papers that are like this. Like the "Attention is all you need"
- mattigames 4y agoAt some point you have to accept that the likelihood of something you wrote is read increases if you make it entertaining even if just a tiny bit, yes even academics fall for this trick, is usually not concious but academics are humans too and some tricks like that help increase the likelyhood to grab their attention, even subjects that they already strongly believe are interesting to them.
- bee_rider 4y agoFWIW it isn’t a new thing exactly. https://slate.com/technology/2015/12/the-best-funny-clever-or-offensive-science-paper-titles.html https://slate.com/technology/2015/12/the-best-funny-clever-o... They had an example from 2004 that I saw at least; but the article is from 2015 and lots of their links have died, so there might have been an older one. Anyway, 2004 is long enough to not call this a new phenomenon, right?
- saurik 4y agoThis is just a popular format for titles in general, whatever the medium / format / genre.
- bee_rider 4y agoI think you are right, but it is particularly pronounced in papers because you sorta want a noun-y thing to refer to your new idea. So “NounPun: here’s what it does” is a good title format for both telling the reader what the thing is, and why they care about it.
- aix1 4y agoHere is a preprint from the year 2000: "How to Roll a Join: Asynchronous Incremental View Maintenance". https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~beyer/papers/matview_sigmod00.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~beyer/papers/matview_sigmod00.pdf