How to Read a Paper

Disclaimer --before the blog

This blog is totally based on the work of S.Keshav et al.Here to get the recource
Also, pointing out the mistakes or any suggestion is always welcomed.

I. Some words

As a undergraguate, I do have some spare time in this winter holiday, especially taking that the usually longer winter in the northeast of China into consideration. Hence, I plan to leverage it to further explore both Natural Language Processing(NLP for short) and Computer Vision(CV for short).
Speicfic plan is as follows.

1.two papers accepted by ACL, daily
2.one paper accpeted by CVPR, daily

In later section, some useful skills in reading papers effectively and efficiently are introduced.

II. Methodology-THE THREE-PASS APPROACH

Overview：
Finishing reading this section, you will be able to:

• choose to read further a paper or not in no more than ten minutes
• be good at grasping the main idea of a paper in a short time
• fully understand a paper

2.1. Choose to Read or not — the first pass

Reading Content:

• title
• abstract
• introduction
• section and sub-section headings
• mathematical content
• conclusion

Time:

• about five to ten minutes

Deliverables(five Cs):
After the first pass, you are supposed to get the following information.

• Category:
  What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?
• Content:
  Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?
• Correctness:
  Do the assumptions appear to be valid?
• Contributions:
  What are the paper’s main contributions?
• Clarity:
  Is the paper well written?

Note that Content and Contributions are always the main concerns.
The second and third pass may be needed if you are interested.

2.2. Grasp the Main Idea — the second pass

Reading Content:

• the whole paper except details such as proofs.
  Note that figure, diagrams and other illustrations are the major concerns.

Time:

• about an hour

Deliverables:
during the second pass, you are supposed to jot down the following stuff

• relevant unread reference
• questions you wanna ask the author
• comments
• terminology you don’t know

Sometimes you don’t have to understand every single part of the paper. Actually, knowing the main idea of a paper is good enough for your work upon most occasions. To this end, not all unread references or terminologies are what you have to figure out. However, you still have to fully understand some particular papers. And that’s why we need the third pass

2.3. Fully Understand — the third pass

Key to the third pass:

• virtually re-implement the paper
• or re-create

What You Should Do In This Pass:

• identify and challenge every assumption in every statement.
• think about how you yourself would present a particular idea
• jot down ideas for future work

Note that, regardless of the pass you executed, jotting down the excellent expression in the paper is always a laudable habit.

III. Recommend Some Access To Up-To-Date Knowledge（CS）

3.1. WeChat Subscription Accounts

• PaperWeekly
• 专知