The probability theory is really just for getting it published in a fancy journal. You can get by without needing any of it. It's usually sufficient to read just the "empirical evidence" section.
IMHO you are looking at the trees and missing the forest. If you focus on the concept instead of on the math, you maybe able to find something more useful. I don't understand the maths, but this I do understand: from the term structure and time series estimators, the authors determined that they correlated differently with the uncertainty in earning and found some behaviors that are different when correlating term structure vs time series. This is tradable information if I am trading options because.....