[Paper Title Here]
Paper: Full title
Authors: …
Year / Venue: …
Why I’m reading this: (one line — what question or problem sent you here?)
1. The One-Sentence Idea
Force yourself to compress the whole paper into one plain-English sentence, no jargon. If you can’t, you haven’t understood it yet — that’s fine, come back to this line last.
2. The Problem
What was broken, missing, or bad before this paper? What could earlier models/methods NOT do? Be concrete — “translation was bad” is too vague; “a single fixed-size vector couldn’t hold long sentences” is the kind of thing to write here.
3. The Key Idea (How They Fixed It)
Explain their solution in your own words, like you’re teaching it to past-you. A rough diagram or equation is fine if it helps you more than prose.
4. The Evidence
What experiment, table, or figure actually convinced you the idea works? Quote a real number or result — not “it performed better,” but “BLEU score went from X to Y on dataset Z.” Also note: what are they comparing against — is that comparison fair?
5. Terms I Had to Look Up
Running glossary. Every paper has 3-5 words that stop you cold — write them here as you hit them, in your own definition, not the textbook one.
- term: meaning
6. A Question I’d Push Back On
Pick one thing you’re skeptical of or confused by — an assumption, a missing comparison, a claim that feels too strong. You don’t need to be “mean” (per your original notes) — genuinely curious/skeptical is enough for a first pass.
7. How This Connects to What I Already Know
Link to your own posts/experiments. Did this paper explain something you’d already noticed, contradict something you assumed, or introduce something totally new?
My Takeaway
2-3 sentences: if you forgot everything else about this paper, what’s the one thing you’d want to remember?
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