ComLittee: Literature Discovery with Personal Elected Author Committees

In order to help scholars understand and follow a research topic, significant research has been devoted to creating systems that help scholars discover relevant papers and authors. Recent approaches have shown the usefulness of highlighting relevant authors while scholars engage in paper discovery. However, these systems do not capture and utilize users' evolving knowledge of authors. We reflect on the design space and introduce ComLittee, a literature discovery system that supports author-centric exploration. In contrast to paper-centric interaction in prior systems, ComLittee's author-centric interaction supports curation of research threads from individual authors, finding new authors and papers with combined signals from a paper recommender and the curated authors' authorship graphs, and understanding them in the context of those signals. In a within-subjects experiment that compares to an author-highlighting approach, we demonstrate how ComLittee leads to a higher efficiency, quality, and novelty in author discovery that also improves paper discovery

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 need for new technology to support the reading process grows. 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. The PDF format for sharing research papers is widely used due to its portability, but it has significant downsides including: static content, poor accessibility for low-vision readers, and difficulty reading on mobile devices. 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 ten research prototype interfaces and conducted usability studies with more than 300 participants and real-world users showing improved reading experiences for scholars. We've also released a production reading interface for research papers that will incorporate the best features as they mature. We structure this paper around challenges scholars and the public face when reading research papers -- Discovery, Efficiency, Comprehension, Synthesis, and Accessibility -- and present an overview of our progress and remaining open challenges