Unfortunately, these equations only started making intuitive sense for me once I saw them repeated many times, in different contexts. The key was being able to

Unfortunately, these equations only started making intuitive sense for me once I saw them repeated many times, in different contexts. The key was being able to recognize patterns and being able to roughly predict the contents of the equation based on its structure. For example, here the equation begins with the L(x_i, x_j, phi) which looks intimidating but it’s a very standard way of saying “likelihood” with mathematical notation. Then, you might notice that the equation has two “indicator” functions (the strange looking 1’s). Again, weird but it can be translated to an if else statement. Then, it’s easy to predict that one will have an = sign and the other a =/=. All that to say that it’s painful for a bit to parse every symbol, but it gets easier to recognize the semantics after you’ve done it for similar cases.