What’s an AI Article Summarizer and How It Makes Researchers’ Lives Easier

Reading and summarizing text is a long and monotonous task, but now there’s a solution on the horizon. One that can save researchers and academics literally hours working on their papers.

Part of researchers, students, and academics’ tasks is to parse data and technical jargon—an arduous task for anyone. Thankfully, there’s new technology available that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make the job easier.

To improve this process and save you time, AI assistants are being used during the research process in all sorts of ways by academics around the world. More specifically, AI research paper summarizers are becoming more prevalent thanks to the progress of machine learning technology.

In this article, we explore the role of AI in the academic community. And, we’ll also discuss some of the best summary generators and PDF summarizers to use next time you find yourself writing a journal article.

What is an AI Summarizer?

An AI Summarizer is a type of software that condenses the key points of an article, paper, or other document into it’s key takeaways without sacrificing the integrity of the writing. It boils down the most important points into a shorter piece of text, helping researchers save time doing it themselves.

You may think that a machine is incapable of summarizing something written by human hands. But thanks to technology like machine learning, we’ve come a long way. Now, there are dozens of AI summarizer tools available that can help you with your paper.

Many different companies have created their own research paper summarizers, which assist researchers with their work. For instance, some AI assistants that can generate single-sentence summaries of research papers. Regardless of how much jargon or technical terms there are, AI tools can easily summarise the content in a way that’s easy to understand and gets the main points across.

Best AI Summarize Tools for Academics

With so many AI tools out there promising the best results, it’s hard to know where to start. And they’re not all as powerful as you might expect. So, to help you narrow down your search, we’ve compiled some of our favourites here.

TLDR

One example of an AI summarizer is TLDR. Named after internet slang for “too long, didn’t read”, this tool was created by Semantic Scholar. The software can generate one-sentence summaries of the over 10 million research papers in Semantic Scholar’s library. If you’re in the early phase of compiling studies on your topic, then this is a great tool to use.

SMMRY

Another AI assistant that is popular and used by academics is SMMRY. This AI summarizer can help researchers understand a text by providing an abridged version that only highlights key points. Plus, SMMRY can be used for websites too or as a PDF summarizer. If you cite a lot of websites in your search, this is a great tool to help make the job easier.

Flowcite

Finally, there’s Flowcite’s Reference Manager tool. Using the integrated summary generator can help academics do research for their papers while also creating a properly formatted citation page at the same time. It also provides article summaries that include key findings and any relevant links. If you want a powerful summarizer that also helps you manage your citations and references, Flowcite’s tool is the perfect choice for you.

As technology progresses forward, machine learning systems are becoming even more accessible. As a result, AI summarizers have become an indispensable tool for academics everywhere. But how exactly do they work? Let’s take a look at the science behind them.

How does an AI Summarize an Article?

Seeing an AI tool turn thousands of words into just a few paragraphs is astounding. But, you want to make sure you’re not losing any important information. So, let’s learn about how they managed to achieve this impressive feat.

One of the necessary systems for computers is natural language processing (NLP). Through NLP, computers are able to understand the human language through text and dialogue.

It goes without saying that NLP is important for AI summarizers. Through NLP, AIs can perform tasks that are related to text summarization, such as headline generation, question answering, and text classification.

There are two different methods for machines to generate a summary: extraction and abstraction.

• Extraction—In this process, the computer generates a summary using sentences from the source material. Sentences are chosen through an algorithm that determines which sentences are most important to understand the text.
• Abstraction—During abstraction, the AI creates unique sentences to produce a summary. The summary is then generated by paraphrasing the original document.

As you might expect, abstraction requires more complicated NLP techniques for AIs to be able to generate a competent summary. Paraphrasing takes more work than simply copying and pasting a sentence that was already written. That’s why the extraction method is more commonly used by companies that provide AI summarizing tools.

To sum up, AI summarization uses machine learning technology to understand how our language works and prioritise the most important parts of a piece of text. As NLP improves, so will the capacity for AIs to create a more coherent research paper summary.

The Benefits of an AI Summarizer

Automated summarizers were created to help people easily parse through a large selection of documents. With the help of an AI assistant, you can have an easier time writing by expediting the time needed to read through your sources.

Here are some of the benefits that come with using an AI summarizer.

• Saves time writing and reading long articles
• Make research gathering easier
• Summaries are easier to understand than abstracts

In general, an AI summarizer can decrease your burden when putting together a journal article becuase automated summaries alleviate the biggest time-consuming process: research.

The Downsides of an AI Summarizer

Despite all its upsides, AI technology is still imperfect.

Human intervention is still necessary for AI to complete more complex tasks. Take, for instance, the Go match between an AI and a professional player. While the robot did win a good portion of the games, there was an instance where the AI made baffling moves that resulted in its loss.

Simply put, machines cannot fully replace humans. This goes double for understanding human language. So, while an AI summarizer can extract the key points of a written work, it can at times misinterpret the text. That’s why you still need to double-check the automated summaries to be sure that it’s correct.

How Researchers & Journalists Can Leverage AI Summarizers

In general, with an AI summarizer, researchers can sift through more information in less time. With access to coherent summaries of past research, news articles, and websites, researchers can grab the most relevant information—in the quickest way possible—needed for their paper.

Another profession that can reap the rewards from AI Summarizers is journalists. Journalists have much easier access to new sources with the help of AI assistants. With the aid of headline generators and news article summaries, journalists will have an easier time doing their jobs.

In short, plenty of different professions can use automated summarizers.

Use AI Technology in Your Academic Paper

Having to pick out the most important information from a research paper takes a lot of time, which takes away from actually writing your work. So why not assign the task of summarizing to someone (or something) else?

AI summarizers can do the hard work of reference management and citation for you. With their help, you can get the message of any research paper or news article quickly.

Flowcite offers its Reference Manager tool to provide AI summarizing services. Plus, with its Reference Manager, you can reduce the time it takes to parse a document by as much as 70%. The tool also provides key findings and direct links to the sources.

So, will you be using an AI assistant for your next research paper?

Let us introduce you to AI summarizer technology.