{"id":1129,"date":"2021-12-25T19:22:33","date_gmt":"2021-12-25T19:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2022-01-17T13:59:29","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T13:59:29","slug":"how-to-write-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/how-to-write-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"How to write numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of students\u2014and increasingly, given how young the field of NLP is\u2014don&#8217;t know how to write numbers in papers. Here are a few basic principles (some of these are loosely based off the APA guidelines):<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Use the same number of decimals every time and don&#8217;t omit trailing zeros after the decimal. Thus &#8220;.50&#8221; or &#8220;.5000&#8221; and not &#8220;.5&#8221;.<\/li>\r\n<li>Round to a small number of decimals: 2, 4, or 6 are all standard choices.<\/li>\r\n<li>Omit leading zeros before the decimal if possible values of whatever quantity are always within [0, 1], thus you might say you got &#8220;.9823&#8221; accuracy.<\/li>\r\n<li>(For LaTeX users) put the minus sign in math mode, too, or it&#8217;ll appear as a hyphen (ASCII char 45), which is quite a bit shorter and just looks wrong.<\/li>\r\n<li>Use commas to separate the hundreds and thousands place (etc.) in large integers, and try not to use too many large exact integers; rounding is fine once they get large.<\/li>\r\n<li>Expressions like &#8220;3k&#8221;, &#8220;1.3m&#8221; and &#8220;2b&#8221; are too informal; just write &#8220;3,000&#8221;, &#8220;1.3 million&#8221;, and &#8220;2 billion&#8221;.<\/li>\r\n<li>Many evaluation metrics can either be written as (pseudo-)probabilities or percentages. Pick one or the other format and stick with it.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>A few other points about tables with numbers (looking at you LaTeX users):<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Right-align numbers in tables.<\/li>\r\n<li>Don&#8217;t put two numbers (like mean and standard deviation or a range) in a single cell; the alignment will be all wrong. Just use more cells and tweak the intercolumnar spacing.\u00a0<\/li>\r\n<li>Don&#8217;t make the text of your tables smaller than the body text, which makes the table hard to read. Just redesign the table instead.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of students\u2014and increasingly, given how young the field of NLP is\u2014don&#8217;t know how to write numbers in papers. Here are a few basic principles (some of these are loosely based off the APA guidelines): Use the same number of decimals every time and don&#8217;t omit trailing zeros after the decimal. Thus &#8220;.50&#8221; or &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/how-to-write-numbers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;How to write numbers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1174,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions\/1174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}