An artificial intelligence (AI)-based software that automatically generates one-sentence summaries of research papers was recently revealed by the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington.

The free tool, which creates what the team calls TLDRs (the common Internet acronym for ‘Too long, didn’t read’), was activated for search results at Semantic Scholar.

For now, the software generates sentences only for the ten million computer-science papers covered by Semantic Scholar, but papers from other disciplines should be getting summaries in the next month or so, once the software has been fine-tuned, says Dan Weld, who manages the Semantic Scholar group at AI2.

Preliminary testing suggests that the tool helps readers to sort through search results faster than viewing titles and abstracts, especially on mobile phones, he says.

A preprint describing the tool was first published on the arXiv preprint server in April and was accepted for publication after peer review by a natural-language-processing conference taking place this month.

The researchers have made their code freely available, along with a working demo website where anyone can try the tool.

“I predict that this kind of tool will become a standard feature of scholarly search in the near future. Actually, given the need, I am amazed it has taken this long to see it in practice,” says Jevin West, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who tested the tool at Nature’s request.

“It is not perfect, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction,” he says.

Sources

tl;dr: this AI sums up research papers in a sentence