Semantic Scholar | Semantic Reader

"Semantic Reader Beta is an augmented reader with the potential to revolutionize scientific reading by making it more accessible and richly contextual.

Observations of scientists reading technical papers showed that readers frequently page back and forth looking for the definitions of terms and mathematical symbols as well as for the details of cited papers. This need to jump around through the paper breaks the flow of paper comprehension.

Semantic Reader provides this information directly in context by dimming unrelated text and providing details in tooltips, and soon will also provide corresponding term definitions. It uses artificial intelligence to understand a document’s structure. Usability studies show readers answered questions requiring deep understanding of paper concepts significantly more quickly with ScholarPhi than with a baseline PDF reader; furthermore, they viewed much less of the paper.

Based on the ScholarPhi research from the Semantic Scholar team at AI2, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington, and supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Semantic Reader is now available in beta for a select group of arXiv papers on semanticscholar.org with plans to add additional features and expand coverage soon...."