The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces
Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the greater the need for new technology to support scholars. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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ACM
2024
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157322 |
| _version_ | 1824458108107227136 |
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| author | Lo, Kyle Chang, Joseph Head, Andrew Bragg, Jonathan Zhang, Amy Trier, Cassidy Anastasiades, Chloe August, Tal Authur, Russell Bragg, Danielle Bransom, Erin Cachola, Isabel Candra, Stefan Chandrasekhar, Yoganand Chen, Yen-Sung Cheng, Evie Chou, Yvonne Downey, Doug Evans, Rob Fok, Raymond |
| author_facet | Lo, Kyle Chang, Joseph Head, Andrew Bragg, Jonathan Zhang, Amy Trier, Cassidy Anastasiades, Chloe August, Tal Authur, Russell Bragg, Danielle Bransom, Erin Cachola, Isabel Candra, Stefan Chandrasekhar, Yoganand Chen, Yen-Sung Cheng, Evie Chou, Yvonne Downey, Doug Evans, Rob Fok, Raymond |
| author_sort | Lo, Kyle |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the greater the need for new technology to support scholars. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. For instance, the PDF format for sharing papers remains widely used due to its portability but has significant downsides, inter alia, static content and poor accessibility for low-vision readers. This paper explores the question "Can recent advances in AI and HCI power intelligent, interactive, and accessible reading interfaces, even for legacy PDFs?" We describe the Semantic Reader Project, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers. Through this project, we've developed a collection of novel reading interfaces and evaluated them with study participants and real-world users to show improved reading experiences for scholars. We've also released a production research paper reading interface that will continuously incorporate novel features from our research as they mature. We structure this paper around five key opportunities for AI assistance in scholarly reading---discovery, efficiency, comprehension, synthesis, and accessibility---and present an overview of our progress and discuss remaining open challenges. |
| first_indexed | 2025-02-19T04:20:39Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/157322 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2025-02-19T04:20:39Z |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publisher | ACM |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1573222025-01-04T05:56:22Z The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces Lo, Kyle Chang, Joseph Head, Andrew Bragg, Jonathan Zhang, Amy Trier, Cassidy Anastasiades, Chloe August, Tal Authur, Russell Bragg, Danielle Bransom, Erin Cachola, Isabel Candra, Stefan Chandrasekhar, Yoganand Chen, Yen-Sung Cheng, Evie Chou, Yvonne Downey, Doug Evans, Rob Fok, Raymond Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the greater the need for new technology to support scholars. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. For instance, the PDF format for sharing papers remains widely used due to its portability but has significant downsides, inter alia, static content and poor accessibility for low-vision readers. This paper explores the question "Can recent advances in AI and HCI power intelligent, interactive, and accessible reading interfaces, even for legacy PDFs?" We describe the Semantic Reader Project, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers. Through this project, we've developed a collection of novel reading interfaces and evaluated them with study participants and real-world users to show improved reading experiences for scholars. We've also released a production research paper reading interface that will continuously incorporate novel features from our research as they mature. We structure this paper around five key opportunities for AI assistance in scholarly reading---discovery, efficiency, comprehension, synthesis, and accessibility---and present an overview of our progress and discuss remaining open challenges. 2024-10-15T21:15:04Z 2024-10-15T21:15:04Z 2024-10-01 2024-10-01T07:45:43Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0001-0782 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157322 Lo, Kyle, Chang, Joseph, Head, Andrew, Bragg, Jonathan, Zhang, Amy et al. 2024. "The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces." Communications of the ACM, 67 (10). PUBLISHER_CC en http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3659096 Communications of the ACM Creative Commons Attribution https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The author(s) application/pdf ACM Association for Computing Machinery |
| spellingShingle | Lo, Kyle Chang, Joseph Head, Andrew Bragg, Jonathan Zhang, Amy Trier, Cassidy Anastasiades, Chloe August, Tal Authur, Russell Bragg, Danielle Bransom, Erin Cachola, Isabel Candra, Stefan Chandrasekhar, Yoganand Chen, Yen-Sung Cheng, Evie Chou, Yvonne Downey, Doug Evans, Rob Fok, Raymond The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces |
| title | The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces |
| title_full | The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces |
| title_fullStr | The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces |
| title_short | The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces |
| title_sort | semantic reader project augmenting scholarly documents through ai powered interactive reading interfaces |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157322 |
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