CS632: Paper Summaries

A good summary should have these main points:

• Problem and motivation: What is the problem being studied in the paper? 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?
• Assumptions: Does the paper make assumptions that are important and that possibly restrict the applicability of the techniques described? Does the paper solve exactly the problem, or does it only solve a restricted version of the problem
• 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?
• Experimental evaluation: If it is not obvious why, give an intuition why the technique is better than or outperforms existing techniques.

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.

How will the paper summaries be graded?

• For each paper summary that you hand in, you will get either three, two, or one point.