IJCAI Writing Style

Use this when revising the main paper. IJCAI rewards clear, significant, original AI work that a broad program committee can evaluate quickly.

Revision rules

• Put the AI contribution in the first page: problem, gap, core idea, evidence, and why it matters beyond a narrow benchmark.
• Keep the submission self-contained; supplementary material should support, not rescue, the main argument.
• Spend the 7-page body on claims reviewers can verify: formal setup, method, theorem or algorithm, baselines, ablations, and limitations.
• Use third-person citation language for prior work by the authors and remove acknowledgements, contribution statements, and identity-revealing phrasing from the review version.
• Include an ethics or broader-impact statement when sensitive data, high-stakes deployment, safety, discrimination, privacy, consent, copyright, or societal harm is plausible.
• Treat LLM assistance conservatively. Style polishing may be acceptable in some cycles, but LLM-written manuscript text, fake citations, or unverified claims can trigger rejection.

Writing for a cross-subfield committee

IJCAI's PC mixes symbolic AI, search, planning, KR, constraint reasoning, multi-agent, game theory, ML, NLP, and vision. Write so a reviewer outside your niche reaches the contribution fast, because the out-of-area reviewer often drives summary-reject risk.

Worked vignette: framing a KR paper for breadth

A knowledge-representation paper opens with three paragraphs of description-logic preliminaries before naming its contribution. A planning or learning reviewer may summary-reject for unclear significance. The fix: open with the reasoning task, why current encodings fall short, and the new tractable fragment, then defer the heavy formalism. The technical depth stays; only the ordering changes so a broad IJCAI reader sees the payoff within two reads.

Reviewer pushback and the venue-specific fix

• "Could not find the contribution." Rewrite the first page as problem, gap, idea, evidence, significance; this is the single highest-leverage IJCAI edit.
• "Reads like a journal extension." Compress to the body limit and cite the longer work in third person rather than reproducing it.
• "Significance only within one benchmark." Add a sentence on why the result matters across AI, not just on the chosen suite.

Output format

[Writing diagnosis] clear / overloaded / underspecified / policy-risky
[First-page fix] <new framing>
[Compression cuts] <what to move or delete>
[Anonymity edits] <phrases to rewrite>
[Ethics/reproducibility edits] <specific additions>