(20 Mar 2024) A surge in tools that generate text is allowing research papers to be summarized for a broad audience, and in any language. But scientists caution that major challenges remain.
Mass-produced lay summaries could yield a trove of benefits. Beyond helping scientists to speed-read the literature, the synopses can be disseminated to people with different levels of expertise, including members of the public. Osarfo-Mensah adds that AI summaries might also aid people who struggle with English. “Some people hide behind jargon because they don’t necessarily feel comfortable trying to explain it,” she says, but AI could help them to rework technical phrases. Max Heckel is the founder of SciSummary, a company in Columbus, Ohio, that offers a tool that allows users to import a paper to be summarized. The tool can also translate summaries into other languages, and is gaining popularity in Indonesia and Turkey, he says, arguing that it could topple language barriers and make science more accessible.
Despite these strides, some scientists feel that improvements are needed before we can rely on AI to describe studies accurately.
Nature has the article in full here.
