Semantic Reader is an “AI-powered augmented scientific reading application”.
The problem that Semantic Reader aims to address are the “…many points of friction that break the flow of comprehension when reading technical papers:”
- Paging back and forth looking for the details of cited papers.
- Recognizing the same work across multiple papers.
- Losing track of reading history and notes.
- A PDF format that is not well suited to mobile reading or assistive technologies such as screen readers.
“Semantic Reader uses artificial intelligence to understand a document’s structure and merge it with the Semantic Scholar’s academic corpus, providing detailed information in context via tooltips and other overlays.”
I’ve only briefly played around with Semantic Reader, but so far I’m impressed with the automated context highlighting (i.e. colour-coding the paper’s Goals, Methods, and Results). Navigating through these highlights is made very simple with the navigation panel (also the Settings panel) on the right-hand side of the app.
I like that Hypothes.is is integrated so using Semantic Reader doesn’t feel completely isolated from your typical annotation experience.
There are a few things that aren’t ideal, although given that this seems to be in the early stages of development (it’s a beta version), I’m hoping that these issues will be addressed soon.
- You can’t upload your own library and the articles supported by Semantic Reader is limited to arXiv papers in the Semantic Scholar library. To be fair, this is an enormous number of papers, but the scope of arXiv is still limited, relative to everything else.
- I don’t think you can download the annotated PDF i.e. with the contextual highlighting.
- There is a basic integration with Zotero, but only in one direction i.e. you can save from Semantic Reader into Zotero. But I’d like to open my Zotero papers in Reader, which doesn’t seem possible at this point.
- I’d like it if you could have Semantic Reader collapse all of the Goal, Method, and Results highlights, into a single Goal, Method, and Results summary. I know what you’re thinking…this is what the abstract does. Except, most abstracts (IMO) are poorly written. They’re not designed to give you the information you need; they’re designed to pique your interest and keep you reading.
This definitely feels like an app that I’m going to follow and maybe start using soon.
You can find out more about Semantic Reader here, as well as find links to example papers you can explore.