CS632: Paper Summaries

Why is paper summary writing important?

• A good summary should be such that you should able to read the summary after a few months and still know what the paper was about. Summary writing is important for a researcher. We all tend to forget the many papers that we have read over time, and a good summary helps us to recollect the main ideas in the paper without investing a lot of time in re-reading the paper.

A good summary should have these main points:

• Problem Statement: What is the problem being studied in the paper and what are the major assumptions?
• Motivation: Why is the problem being studied and why is this paper being written? Is it a novel problem? Or is it a novel problem setting? Or does the paper improve upon existing work?
• Techniques: What techniques are proposed and what is the basic idea behind the technique? This should not just list the keywords but should should give an idea of the technique too.
• What are the benefits of the technique -- is it easier to implement or does it give better guarantees or does it run faster or does it provide more functionality -- over existing techniques?
• Contributions: If it is not obvious why, give an intuition why the technique is better that (say outperforms) existing techniques.