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Summary Structure

Good paper summaries must be longer than one A4 page of text and in pdf format. However, you should keep it as short as it gets. In general, concentrate on the content of the summary and forget about its size.
Summaries should have approximately the following structure, where each point should be made at least of 2-3 sentences.

  • Context and Background: What is the domain of the work? Is there any basic concept to mention for understading the paper?
  • Problem: What is the problem being addressed in the paper? Why is a difficult problem? (Problem Statement and Challenges) Why did the authors decide to consider it? (Motivation) Why is the problem important for a research community? (Impact)
  • Main Idea: What is the main idea of the authors to address the problem? E.g. how they propose to solve the problem above? How did auhtor implemented their solution is not necessarily interesting, so refrain to describe in details this point.
  • Contribution: How does this paper advance the state of the art? What is exactly new and valuable in the paper?
  • Evaluation: Precisely describe the methods used by authors to evaluate their approach and what benchmarks they used. If your task is to summarise tool papers (e.g. authors developed some tool to solve some problem) you should precisely describe the architecture of the tool. Your summary should show us that you understood what exactly tool does. You might get more points if you try out and describe your experience in using the prototype or the tool.
  • Pros and Cons/Limitations and suggestions for improvement: Provide your opinion about what you think is good about the paper and what are the weaknesses. Likewise, report any limitation and possible ideas for improving the work and/or the paper.

Additional - Mandatory - Items

At the end of the summary, you must include the following informations, possibly on two new pages.
  • Questions: Mention what you did not understand or in general critical questions about the paper you would like to discuss.
  • Related work: Compile a list of papers that are related to the one you summarized. You must find at least two additional papers and for each provide a short comment on the reason(s) why you selected them. Reporting papers that are already cited in the paper you summarized does not count.