HACKER Q&A
📣 xqcgrek2

Bots for summarizing and searching complex scientific papers?


Are there any language models and bots available yet that can take a complex and multilayered piece of technical work, such as a scientific paper, and summarize its arguments? Including perhaps how the paper fits into the landscape of technical papers (e.g. the whole arxiv.org)?

Could it write a technical abstract or accompanying summary for a general audience based on the main body text, e.g. Methods, Results and the context or significance of the work?


  👤 tikkun Accepted Answer ✓
Here's the list I have saved:

https://www.explainpaper.com

https://elicit.org

https://scite.ai

And it wasn't already in my list, though https://typeset.io/ posted in this thread by Xeophon also looks neat


👤 james-revisoai
Both of the (commercial) solutions work well, if you are looking for open source, try LangChain.

It's just 15 lines to do document summarization and you can ask it to summarize arguments by customizing the summarisation prompt.

You could bring in other papers context with other tech, but indexing it all would be the tricky bit.

There's also something called GROBID which extracts scientific PDFs much better than generic PDF readers. it's worth spinning up a docker instance of it and getting the text that way for LangChain if you have time.


👤 hemloc_io
U Washington did some research a couple years ago you might find interesting.

I think they also had a website up for a while.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03277-2


👤 Xeophon
You are looking for https://typeset.io/

👤 zora_goron
Microsoft Edge Dev with the new Bing + OpenAI integration seems capable of this as well: https://twitter.com/AlphaSignalAI/status/1624077152302862339

👤 seydor
Typically papers have an abstract which must summarize the work. Many papers also have highlights in 4-5 bullets. and some also have an "like i m 5" overview.

I think it's more interesting to find bots that can search across different papers to summarize the state of art in some question


👤 dakshisdaksh
We built this simple tool. chatur-gpt.streamlit.app It’s gonna help you ask questions related to the paper. Lemme know if you’re gonna pay for a more advanced version of the same. We can read multiple papers and make a landscape recursively.

👤 tough
This was on HN a month back. https://www.explainpaper.com/

At least another alternative pops up on my twitter Ads


👤 nnurmanov
How come Galactica did not make to the list?