Beyond Text Generation: Supporting Writers with Continuous Automatic Text Summaries
This work addresses the problem of aiding writers in planning and reflection, offering an incremental tool that extends NLP capabilities beyond direct text generation.
The authors tackled the problem of supporting writers by developing a text editor that provides continuous paragraph-wise summaries as margin annotations, using automatic text summarization with levels from full text to keywords. In user studies with 4 and 8 participants writing analytic essays, they found that the summaries helped users revise content and scope, gain an overview, and develop strategies for integrating insights.
We propose a text editor to help users plan, structure and reflect on their writing process. It provides continuously updated paragraph-wise summaries as margin annotations, using automatic text summarization. Summary levels range from full text, to selected (central) sentences, down to a collection of keywords. To understand how users interact with this system during writing, we conducted two user studies (N=4 and N=8) in which people wrote analytic essays about a given topic and article. As a key finding, the summaries gave users an external perspective on their writing and helped them to revise the content and scope of their drafted paragraphs. People further used the tool to quickly gain an overview of the text and developed strategies to integrate insights from the automated summaries. More broadly, this work explores and highlights the value of designing AI tools for writers, with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities that go beyond direct text generation and correction.