Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Research Paper, Reading, Guide
Acronyms: AI - Artificial Intelligence
Descriptor: Personal Documentation
Artificial Intelligence is a fast-paced field. Plenty of new research is happening in every corner of the world. To keep up with the advancements in the said fields, one has to read plenty of research papers. Learning how to go through a research paper is one of the vital skills, which most of us learn very late, or probably never. With alot of online resources suggesting us a start point, it left me confused with the exact planning that perfectly fits my interest. My motive behind this post is to be of any help to the fellow researchers, who wish to jumpstart their career towards AI research. Our primary goal behind reading these papers is to identify its scientific contribution. For this reason, one may expect themselves to go through the paper repeatedly. In order to get the most from our reading, I found the following approach to match my learning needs in understanding the bits and pieces involved in the paper.
Overview of the Paper
This approach involves a lot of critical and creative reasoning. Ideally, you are trying to build a framework that can help you decide if working with the paper is worth the time. You will need anywhere between 10 to 30 minutes to scan the paper as a bird's eye view and gain a general idea about it. It generally includes the following steps:
1. Read through the title, abstract, introduction, and conclusion.
2. Glance through the sections, and sub-sections headings, but don't dive straight into
its content.
3. Inspect the tables, figures, graphs, and any mathematical equations to understand the
solution, but ignore the vast details of it.
4. Check for the authors, and the companies they work for but don't get intimidated by the
names involved.
5. Check for references. Mark off the ones that you have already read.
After covering the above fronts, one should be in comfortable position to jot out the details about the paper. This includes the following outcomes:
i) Categorize the paper
- Get an overview of the authors, their workplace, and the conference they have submitted the
paper to.
Research Paradigm
- Is it a psychological experiment?
- Is it an improvement over a new idea?
- Is it suggesting a novel prototype?
- Is there any implementation of a new discovery? Have the authors included a complete working
solution to their approach?
- Is it a combination of previously implemented multiple approaches combined into one?
ii) Context
- Identify the problem statement. Get to know the main purpose behind this paper.
You will usually find it towards the ending paragraphs of the Introductory section.
- What are the good ideas behind this paper? What type of scientific contribution is the
author making?
iii) Correctness
- Check to see if it is solving the right problem.
- Is the author's assumption valid?
- Is their logic justifiable with the solution, or are there any flaws in their ideas?
- Is there any limitation of the solution, including those that the authors might have missed?
iv) Contribution
- What are the major contributions of the paper?
- Are there any other applications that the authors might have missed out on?
- Does the author describe the work of other researchers in the same field? How does their
approach differ from the other one?
v) Clarity
- Is the paper well written?
- Does the author provide a space for future research?
- Is the data correct, or gathered in a way it should be collected?
- Is the implementation correct, or can there be a further generalization to it?
- Can there be any improvements that can possibly make a huge difference in the author's
hypothesis?
References