Semantic Scholar, with its new summarization feature, surveys massive numbers of scientific research papers and reduces them to one-sentence summaries. It is notable for achieving the greatest compression rate of all summarizing tools. With scientific papers averaging 5,000 words, Semantic Scholar's summaries are around 21 words. That averages to summaries 1/238th the size of the reports. The closest Semantic Scholar competitor compresses documents to only 1/36th of the report size.

To date, 7 million+ users a month have been accessing Semantic Scholar. There are 10 million computer science papers in the tool’s database. Papers from other disciplines will gradually be added, according to Dan Weld, who supervises the database. This system is hugely helpful to researchers who have had to rely on scanning several titles and long abstracts.

A variety of Natural Language Processing programs have been developed over the years to summarize documents. They generally use one of two approaches: the extractive approach focuses on selecting representative text and using it verbatim in the summary. For instance, Paper Digest, developed in 2018, appears to extract key sentences rather than rewriting findings in its own words.

The other approach is abstractive; it uses natural language generation algorithms to create summaries with original wording. Improvements in AI natural language generation in recent years have made this approach the favored one among programmers.

According to Jevin West, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who tested the new program, "I predict that this kind of tool will become a standard feature of scholarly search in the near future. Actually, given the need, I am amazed it has taken this long to see it in practice."

He noted that it is not yet perfect, "but it's definitely a step in the right direction," he said.

The Allen Institute team is making their code available for free. They also have set up a demonstration site open to all. scitldr.apps.allenai.org/. Currently, only papers written in English are being accepted. But, the program's authors hope to include documents in other languages eventually.