Writing a reading report

Lesson 2 of 3 · 2 min

A reading report turns your reading into something you, your supervisor or your group can use months later. It is shorter than a peer review, and more honest than a summary.

The six parts

Reference. The full citation.
Claim. One sentence, in your words.
Evidence. What supports it, and how strongly. Name the baselines and ablations.
Doubts. What is weak, unclear or missing.
Check. Anything you verified yourself, and how.
Verdict and use. How far you trust it, and how it relates to your own work.

This is also your course project.

Be specific

Vague	Specific
The results are good.	Beats the strongest baseline by 2 points on 3 of 4 datasets, averaged over 5 seeds.
Some things are unclear.	It does not say how the learning rate was chosen, or whether the test set was used for tuning.
Interesting paper.	Its augmentation trick could help our small-data problem; worth testing first.

The results are good.: Specific: Beats the strongest baseline by 2 points on 3 of 4 datasets, averaged over 5 seeds.

Some things are unclear.: Specific: It does not say how the learning rate was chosen, or whether the test set was used for tuning.

Interesting paper.: Specific: Its augmentation trick could help our small-data problem; worth testing first.

Be fair

Say what the paper does well before what it does badly. Separate flaws (the claim is not supported) from limits (it was not tested on X). A report that only criticises is as unhelpful as one that only praises.

RememberClaim, evidence, doubts, check, verdict. Specific enough that someone who hasn't read the paper knows what to believe.