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Show HN: Community-written abstracts for research papers
- vvrm 2y agoUseful idea, but needs a lot more work IMO e.g. - Looks like there's just 7 abstracts right now. - Most of the abstracts are written by the author of the paper, so might not be as unbiased as an actual "community-written" abstract. - There's no stated guidelines for the "community-written" abstract e.g. should it be less biased than the original abstract, should be shorter than the original, should it be more accessible to a less AI crowd or all of the above. - There's no way to upvote/downvote some abstracts e.g. the "attention is all you need" paper has two abstracts and one of them is clearly worse than the other.
- yu3zhou4 2y agoHello! You are on point, building community to write the abstracts, while also setting up relevant guidelines are my main focus for now. I will think of how to communicate guidelines and expectations to the content in a clear way. Thank you! Upvote/downvote is available for logged users. As you pointed out, it's not visible when you're not logged in yet, so it would make sense to show score and buttons to anonymous users as well
- Almondsetat 2y agoI think AI abstracts might work well in most cases because: - they don't have to add anything that wasn't already expressed in the paper, limiting the need for creativity - they can use boring and formulaic language because that's how technical writing is done, limiting the need for creativity - they can give a more neutral overview of the research since they aren't an involved entity with emotional stake
- yu3zhou4 2y agoHello, much thanks for that. AI-generated abstracts might help with filling the platform with a content and as you mentioned, it might be less biased and more objective. This is something people on X also discussed below the launch post [0] and I think you might be right that it's something to do in the near future [0] https://twitter.com/jedmaczan/status/1784889300452077796 https://twitter.com/jedmaczan/status/1784889300452077796
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- croes 2y ago>they don't have to add anything that wasn't already expressed in the paper, limiting the need for creativity But how could we know they add nothing or missed something important like a not? >they can give a more neutral overview of the research since they aren't an involved entity with emotional stake Biased input = biased output. AI can't help with that.
- squigz 2y ago> But how could we know they add nothing or missed something important like a not? Probably by reading it.
- croes 2y agoSo I read the original after the abstract? Sounds like more work not less.
- yu3zhou4 2y agoHere's how I picture this, in an optimistic scenario: Once the number of abstracts grows up, we vote up and down on them, so at the end you get the best abstract for each paper, which is supposed to be informative enough to give you a gist of what authors have learned from their research. It should be enough to let you keep an eye on what's going on in research world in real time and also serve as a filter on what paper is worth reading next This is a grand vision of course, right now we have 9 abstracts, but hey, it's still a good starting point! :p
- squigz 2y agoNo... the author reads it before publishing...
- wongarsu 2y agoPresumably you read the summaries to find promising papers where you will read the abstract (which you then follow up by reading the figures, conclusion, discussion, introduction, then the rest, bailing out once you think this isn't a paper you want to read further). If at any point you figure out the "community abstract" was misleading you can come back and downvote it. The only issue is if community abstracts get published that make good papers unappealing to read, or if the majority of votes come from people who don't actually engage with the paper
- smusamashah 2y agoPlease no. Generated TLDR includes useless fluff in my experience.
- yu3zhou4 2y agoThe holy grail would be generating TL;DRs with a model trained on the best human-written abstracts. Although - there should be a way to hide machine-generated content, for your convenience, since not everyone might be interested in this content
- xorcist 2y agoNo. The holy grail would be TL;DRs written by the actual author, at the time of writing the actual article. No one can better know what the important points are and how to best highlight them. The work of producing a good abstract is a tiny fraction of tiny fraction of the work involved in producing a good article.
- rsfern 2y agoI feel like this is basically already what people who promote their papers on twitter are doing. Other than Twitter or LinkedIn or something (I don’t really use either) I’m not sure there’s really a place for researchers to actually post such a summary where it would be useful, unless everyone starts using this site I guess. Even then, I feel like my time as a researcher would better be spent writing a better abstract, so that this sort of tldr could just be a bolded first or last sentence of a conventional abstract… but I’d be very interested in what other people see as the important or most interesting aspect of my paper Along these lines, I’ve recently taken to using revtex structured abstracts, which are basically a series of topical tldrs covering context, purpose, methods, results, and conclusions. Maybe I’ll experiment with adding a global tldr at the top https://journals.aps.org/prc/edannounce/PhysRevC.84.030001 https://journals.aps.org/prc/edannounce/PhysRevC.84.030001
- wuj 2y agoCommunity-written abstracts also have their merits too. The author's perspective might be limited to their area of expertise and is therefore biased. That perspective can be normalized by the more nuanced interpretations from the community.
- a3w 2y agoNo AI is involved, it is about community written notes. On theoretically any topics, mostly AI topics initially. Author said so, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208511
- UncleMeat 2y agoWhen I was writing papers in grad school the abstract was the part I worked on most closely. This is not because of emotional stakes, but because communicating something subtle in few words is hard. IMO, it is the least applicable section of a paper for AI generated content.
- monkfish328 2y agoNice! What stack did you build this on?
- yu3zhou4 2y agoThanks! Just a basic stuff, Next.js on Vercel, Auth0, Postgres and great UI components by shadcn
- zilti 2y agoHas that abomination of a title also been generated by one?
- yu3zhou4 2y agoLaughed hard on that :D Sorry if the wording is not great, I'm neither a native English speaker nor good at copy-writing. I worry the title can't be changed anymore anyway
- ramon156 2y agoAn admin might be willing to change it (: Could be changed to "TL;DR AI, a ..."
- dang 2y agoChanged now (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40214624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40214624).
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoI'm confused. It's supposed to be human-written abstracts of papers relating to "AI"? Or AI written abstracts for science papers in general? The examples seem to all be machine learning related, but tags include "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning" - if all papers are on those topics are these tags needed?
- yu3zhou4 2y agoHi, sorry for the confusion It started as a TL;DRs platform for research papers on AI, ideated by Francois Fleuret on X, but when I started coding this (and of course already bought a domain :p), I realized that there's no reason to limit the content to AI papers. I'm going to add filters for each subject, to make it more useful for a different subjects
- latexr 2y agoMaybe consider a different domain and website title. From the comments here, it seems like several people are confused.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- meindnoch 2y agoThe title was also generated by an AI?
- yu3zhou4 2y agoA brand new Discord (it's so new that you can be a #2 member :D) https://discord.gg/AJ9YCcqD https://discord.gg/AJ9YCcqD It seem to be a go-to choice platform for communities, so let's try it. You can request features and changes and I post updates about ongoing development
- xpe 2y agoIMO, Discord is a concentration killer; too much distraction. I strongly recommend Zulip instead [1]; it is open source and has hosting options too. [1] https://github.com/zulip/zulip https://github.com/zulip/zulip
- tokai 2y agoWant to point out that these one to two sentence summaries are not abstracts. They lack the structure and content of actual abstracts. Also how can they be community-written if they are written by AI (edit: disregard this, I'm an idiot)? Also also, this should be Show HN right?
- wrasee 2y agoIt’s only from your comment that I realise that this was posted by the author, seems reasonable that should at least be acknowledged.
- wongarsu 2y agoWhich is really what makes them useful. Abstracts are great at what they try to be, but the typical abstract requires a lot of attention to actually read. These summaries lend themselves to quickly scanning over a list of papers to figure out which ones you want to read the abstract of. They are somewhere between summaries and better titles.
- matt1 2y agoIf you're a fan of tldr-ai, you might also like my site, EmergentMind.com, which does something similar: it surfaces trending AI papers based on social media engagement (including HackerNews upvotes!), then summarizes those papers using GPT-4 (a bullet point summary + detailed writeup based on the actual content of the paper), and highlights discussions on HN, Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, and X about that paper. I don't want to highjack this launch post (we definitely need more tools in this space!), just wanted to share my tool for anyone interested since it's related. Feedback welcome: matt@emergentmind.com.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoIf we need AI to summarize research papers, we have lost. To me, this is more evidence that research now is mainly conducted for the sake of producing research, rather than producing knowledge that actually improves life in some way. Even if we look at scientific knowledge merely for the sake of intellectual amusement, this sort of research has gone far past that: extremely specialized papers are really not that interesting except in regard to playing the gmae of research. And I'm speaking from the perspective of a pure mathematician who has read the most specialized an abstract papers and has published several. Yes, you can "get interested" in them simply because they're part of the social game in academia, but for the vast majority of people, even with the capability to understand them, they are far past the point of stimulating natural curiosity. This is all rather ridiculous, because we are devoting so much time and resources to do something so meaningless. It would all collapse on itself it it weren't for the incremental and short-term economic advantages brought on by 1% of the research, which is mainly in turn about developing unsustainable ways of life.
- yu3zhou4 2y agoCore points to communicate after gaining insights from your comments: - platform is open to abstracts (TL;DRs) for all subjects of research - AI-generated TL;DRS will be soon integrated to the platform (initially as a fallback when there is no human-written abstract yet) - naming is the hardest thing in computer science :D Thank you so much for the feedback and the insight, I can't wait to provide the next updates on the progress to you In the meantime, feel invited to join Discord channel https://discord.com/invite/AJ9YCcqD https://discord.com/invite/AJ9YCcqD and X https://twitter.com/keep_FOMO_away https://twitter.com/keep_FOMO_away
- tel 2y agoCan we change the title to something like "Show HN: 'TL;DR AI', community-written abstracts for research papers"? The name of the project, "TL;DR AI", seems to be causing grammatical confusion. It's easy to read the current/original title as "TL;DR, AI-generated abstracts for research papers". I feel lots of comments are responding with that understanding.
- dang 2y agoChanged now (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40214624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40214624). Thanks!
- rsfern 2y agoI think it’s an interesting idea. It could use a documentation page with some clear examples and some guidelines. Don’t use undefined acronyms, try to make it self contained, etc. For example, the tldr(s) “attention is all you need” don’t actually says what attention is or does, which makes the utility of the tldr sort of limited if you don’t already know what attention is. That might be fine depending on the audience for the tldr, but for a general audience IMO it would be better to write more accessibly, or maybe hyperlink to Wikipedia or add footnote definitions for well-known concepts to balance conciseness and discoverability
- yu3zhou4 2y agoThis is a neat idea, I never thought about filling gaps with hyperlinks before. I will explore this idea further, thank you so much rsfern!
- rsfern 2y agoSure, thanks for building this cool site! Thinking about the hyperlink thing more, I think I would revise my suggestion to avoid undefined acronyms - I think you could explicitly encourage them, but only if they are tagged and defined and linked to the originating paper so that experts can skim and newcomers to the field can get context with an expandable html footnote or something. That way you don’t have a zillion tldrs trying to explain what NeRFs are and do, they all just tag NeRF and link to the canonical tldr for NeRF
- yu3zhou4 2y agoThat would make sense. I think how to approach it, so we can have collectively built definitions of concept like NeRF. Maybe we can treat them in a similar way to TL;DRs - everyone can write their own version and we can vote on the best one? Another approach could be some collective improving the definition, similarly to how Wikipedia contributors work What do you think?
- rsfern 2y ago
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- ofou 2y agoThe problem with this kind of tool is the shallowness of knowledge distillation. Content on the internet should enlighten us, not feed us with 140-character TL;DR abstracts, either from humans or AI-generated. This is a tool for exacerbating FOMO, not an actual tool for learning. What I want to see is a tool that teaches me something like GeoHot's 8-hour streams or Karpathy's tinygrad video.
- wuj 2y agoThis website would be cool if it can be turned into the format of a subreddit, i.e: 1. Each paper and its abstract as a post 2. Up/down vote arrows and a number 3. Comment section