AI-Augmented Reading Interfaces
11 papers in this research thread
This thread of research explores how AI and HCI can transform the static experience of reading scholarly papers into intelligent, interactive encounters. The Semantic Reader Project provides an overview of this collaborative effort, organizing contributions around five key challenges: discovery, efficiency, comprehension, synthesis, and accessibility. For discovery, CiteSee personalizes inline citation augmentations using readers' history to help prioritize exploration, while PaperWeaver enriches paper alerts with LLM-generated contextualized descriptions anchored to users' collected papers. For efficiency and comprehension, Papeos fuses talk videos with papers to reduce cognitive load and scaffold navigation, and Qlarify introduces recursively expandable abstracts that let readers progressively drill into paper details via lightweight AI-powered interactions. For synthesis, Threddy and Synergi support thread-based literature review—Threddy through in-situ clipping and organization during reading, and Synergi through mixed-initiative workflows combining citation graphs and LLMs to automatically structure research threads. Relatedly scaffolds exploration of related work sections across papers with dynamic re-ranking and progress tracking. Beyond reading, IdeaSynth extends this line into research ideation, helping scholars iteratively develop ideas through literature-grounded feedback on a node-based canvas.
Papers
CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context
TLDRCiteSee is a paper reading tool that leverages a user’s publishing, reading, and saving activities to provide personalized visual augmentations and context around citations to help users prioritize their exploration.
PaperMage: A Unified Toolkit for Processing, Representing, and Manipulating Visually-Rich Scientific Documents
AbstractDespite growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) models to the scholarly domain, scientific documents remain challenging to work with. They’re often in difficult-to-use PDF formats, and the ecosystem of ...
IdeaSynth: Iterative Research Idea Development Through Evolving and Composing Idea Facets with Literature-Grounded Feedback
TLDRIt is demonstrated that participants effectively used IdeaSynth for real-world research projects at various ideation stages from developing initial ideas to revising framings of mature manuscripts, highlighting the possibilities to adopt IdeaSynth in researcher’s workflows.
PaperWeaver: Enriching Topical Paper Alerts by Contextualizing Recommended Papers with User-collected Papers
TLDRIt was shown that participants using PaperWeaver were able to better understand the relevance of recommended papers and triage them more confidently when compared to a baseline that presented the related work sections from recommended papers.
Synergi: A Mixed-Initiative System for Scholarly Synthesis and Sensemaking
TLDRA novel computational pipeline is developed that ties together user input of relevant seed threads with citation graphs and LLMs, to expand and structure them, respectively, and is found to help scholars efficiently make sense of relevant threads, broaden their perspectives, and increases their curiosity.
Qlarify: Recursively Expandable Abstracts for Dynamic Information Retrieval over Scientific Papers
TLDRRecursively expandable abstracts are introduced, a novel interaction paradigm that dynamically expands abstracts by progressively incorporating additional information from the papers’ full text during their dive into the full text.
The Semantic Reader Project
TLDRThe Semantic Reader Project is described, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers, and a collection of novel reading interfaces are developed and evaluated and evaluated them with study participants and real-world users to show improved reading experiences for scholars.
Papeos: Augmenting Research Papers with Talk Videos
TLDRPapeos is presented, a novel reading and authoring interface that allow authors to augment their papers by segmenting and localizing talk videos alongside relevant paper passages with automatically generated suggestions.
Relatedly: Scaffolding Literature Reviews with Existing Related Work Sections
TLDRThis work designs a system, Relatedly, that scaffolds exploring and reading multiple related work paragraphs on a topic, with features including dynamic re-ranking and highlighting to spotlight unexplored dissimilar information, auto-generated descriptive paragraph headings, and low-lighting of redundant information.
Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication
TLDRThis research investigates features representing domain, subdomain, and individual knowledge to predict individual jargon familiarity and compares supervised and prompt-based approaches, finding that prompt-based methods yield the highest accuracy, though the task remains difficult and supervised approaches have lower false positive rates.
Threddy: An Interactive System for Personalized Thread-based Exploration and Organization of Scientific Literature
TLDRA tool integrated into users’ reading process that helps them with leveraging authors’ existing summarization of threads, typically in introduction or related work sections, in order to situate their own work’s contributions is developed.