Framework
Your Introduction should read as one continuous argument, made up of five moves that build on each other:
Broad Impact → Intellectual Merit → Approach → Findings → Contributions
Broad Impact convinces the reader that your task matters. Intellectual Merit narrows that down to what specifically remains unsolved. Approach proposes how your work addresses that exact gap. Findings previews the evidence that your approach works. Contributions states what is new for the field as a result. Each move should read as a direct response to the one before it.
Broad Impact
If the selected task has been popular in recent years, highlight its prevalence and reference recent seminal works related to the study:
TASK has recently gained lots of interests because REASONS (CITATIONS).
You may want to make separate citations per reason if appropriate
e.g., REASON 1 (CITATIONS), REASON 2 (CITATIONS)
If the selected task is new or has not been widely recognized in recent times, explain its significance and cite relevant works that provide evidence of its importance:
TASK is important because REASONS (CITATIONS), yet it has been underexplored.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of opting for novel tasks compared to popular ones? Should you ever choose tasks that are neither novel nor popular?
Intellectual Merit
Identify the challenges present in this task that you aim to enhance, and provide citations to previous works that have addressed these challenges:
Despite the great advancement, CHALLENGE is challenging because REASONS (CITATIONS).
The scope of references here should encompass a broader range than the ones cited in the Related Work section.
Concisely describe the major approaches that have been developed to tackle these challenges and cite the corresponding works:
Several stuides have proposed APPROACH to overcome this issue (CITATIONS).
It should serve as an overarching description of previous works that have employed similar approaches.
Explain the limitations associated with those approaches.:
However, it is still limited by REASONS.
If your work addresses multiple challenges, you may consider dedicating a paragraph to each challenge, where each paragraph follows all the steps outlined in this section.
Both Broad Impact and Intellectual Merit should use citations as evidence rather than explaining any single prior work in detail. It is generally better to categorize prior work and cite each category as a group than to walk through individual papers one by one.
Approach
Having established the gap in Intellectual Merit, elaborate on your approach and reference the Approach section:
In this paper, we present APPROACH to improve CHALLENGE (Section #).
You may need to describe multiple approaches if your work serves multiple objectives.
Explain the hypothesis underlying your approach by specifying which methods are expected to address particular issues:
We hypothesize that METHOD can resolve ISSUE because REASONS.
Our approach uses METHOD to resolve ISSUE because REASONS.
Your approach may be revised as the semester goes on — this section previews your current plan, not a final commitment.
What distinguishes "approach" from "method"? How do we differentiate between "challenge" and "issue"?
Findings
Specify the types of data and/or models used to evaluate your approach, explain the reasons for using them, and reference the Experiments section for detailed information on this aspect:
Our approach is evaluated on DATA with MODELS (Section #).
You may not want to mention the exact names of the datasets or models, but instead refer to their types to emphasize the generalizability of your work.
Provide a high-level description of the primary findings from the analysis that offer supporting evidence for your hypothesis, and reference the Analysis section where a comprehensive breakdown of the results can be found:
Our experiments show that FINDINGS (Section #).
At this stage, you do not have any results yet, so write your expected findings — these will likely be revised once you run actual experiments.
Contributions
List specific contributions of your work:
This work makes THREE main contributions as follows:
- We create a new dataset for TASK.
- We introduce a new model for TASK.
- MODEL achieves the state-state-of-the-art performance on TASK.
- A real system is built for TASK.
Indicate the primary contribution of your work (if any):
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that does APPROACH for TASK.
This work will facilitate the development of ...