[讲座笔记] 沈向洋博士《You are how you read》

You are how you read

14号早上听了沈向洋老师谈如何阅读论文的讲座，觉得有几点蛮重要的，做个记录。

Why reading a research paper？

在读论文前需要清楚自己为什么要去读科研论文，大致有以下几种：

1. 推荐论文或者上一篇论文引用
2. 自己需要做一个presentation或者做相关topic的综述
3. 论文中的某些工作值得借鉴
4. 学习论文写作

Why is reading research papers so hard?

为什么读论文如此困难？主要有：

1. Hard to read
2. Difficult to understand： 缺乏对其相关topic的了解
3. Easy to get stuck：当阅读过程中遇到问题，该向谁或者在哪里寻求帮助
4. What to read next：在读完这篇论文之后，该接着读哪一篇？
5. Impossible to fucus

How do you approach reading papers?

首先，论文类型分为以下三种：

• Propose/formulate a new problem
• Solve a problem peple care about
• Exposition and survey

而读论文的过程，主要有以下三个阶段：

Quick skimming

一篇论文有四个部分：

1. Title
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. The rest of the paper

这个阶段，主要是做shallow learning，这是很重要的。读者更关注于前面三个部分，并且做出判断：

• Is this paper worth reading？
• Should I know something about this paper?
• Can this be quickly rejected (by conference)?

而作为一个作者，在写论文时，必须要使得自己的论文更易读。在Introduction部分，应该很清楚的告诉读者：

• What your paper is about
• What problem it solves
• Why the problem is interesting
• What is really new (and what isn’t)
• Why it’s so neat

Critical reading

在这个阶段，更多是要细读论文提出自己的看法或者疑问。
如果作者是尝试解决一个问题，那么作为读者就要思考：

• are they solving the right problem?
• are there simple solutions not have considered?
• what are the limitations of the solution?

Deep analyzing

• Reading well is about understanding how the paper is written
• Longer term, reading is about enhancing your cognitive model

Creative reading: positive thinking

读论文的过程，应该有更多的思考：

• What are the good idea in this paper
• Improvements that might make important pratical differences?
• Applications/extensions that the authors might not have thought of?
• Can they be generalized further?
• If you were going to start doing research from this paper, what next thing would you do?

Write a one-page review

• Your summary：Key idea in a sentence or two
• Learning from critical reading：any problem?
• Learning from creative reading?：idea for next year’s conference?
• Your opinion：do you recommend this paper?

Analyze with a list of questions

老师列出了在读论文过程中值得去思考的问题：

• What’s main claim? Key idea?
• What’s key limitation?
• Is there code available ? Data?
• Is the idea neat? Is it counter-intuitive?
• Is the contribution significant enough?
• Is the experimentation good? Manual tuning?
• Are there important related papers I missed?
• Is it useful to my work e.g. product dev?
• Is this a paper worth following?
• What do other peple think about this paper?
• Who are dominating this area of research?
• What question should I ask the authors

总结

老师的讲座，对于我这种科研小白来说，收获很足。最后他在tips中提到的两点，觉得值得牢记：

• Read more. Keep reading.
• Be patient：reading = building your cognitive model!