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Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3

explainpaper.com

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Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3

#1

Post by aman_jha »

heyo! Explainpaper lets you upload a research paper PDF. If you don't understand a formula or sentence, just highlight it and the tool explains it for you

I built this a few weeks ago to help me read a neuroscience paper, and it works pretty well! I didn't fine-tune GPT-3, but I do take a lot of context from the paper and feed that into the prompt (not the whole paper).

Ppl have uploaded AI, biology, economics, philosophy papers and even law documents. Works in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French and more as well!

Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3
explainpaper.com

Re: Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3

#3

Post by somberi »

Thanks for building this. Me and my team have been driving it for the last few days, and it is a pleasure to use.

Those law documents - that is probably us :)

Can you comment a bit on fine-tuning options available at the user-level. There were cases (~15%) where it summarized is exactly on the wrong end of the spectrum (disclose within 3 days for example, came out as disclose post-3-days).

Re: Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3

#4

Post by petargyurov »

Looks neat.

I was hoping it would magically translate some of the math notation into plain English but I think it kind of just ignored it. Would love to see this.

Minor feedback: the UI doesn't really convey that the highlighted text is being processed. I was wondering if anything was happening at first.

Re: Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3

#7

Post by aman_jha »

petargyurov wrote: post #4

Looks neat. I was hoping it would magically translate some of the math notation into plain English but I think it kind of just ignored it. Would love to see this. Minor feedback: the UI doesn't really convey that the highlighted text is being processed. I was wondering if anything was happening at first.

We're actively working on math notation! Tough problem but lots of people have asked.

And we'll push an update soon with better loading :)

Re: Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3

#9

Post by thesephist »

aman_jha wrote: post #7
petargyurov wrote: post #4

Looks neat. I was hoping it would magically translate some of the math notation into plain English but I think it kind of just ignored it. Would love to see this. Minor feedback: the UI doesn't really convey that the highlighted text is being processed. I was wondering if anything was happening at first.

We're actively working on math notation! Tough problem but lots of people have asked. And we'll push an update soon with better loading :)

I wonder if a hacky solution may be to have some kind of intermediate model to serialize the text (whether from an image of it or the raw PDF data) into LaTeX? I imagine the LM has seen enough formulas in TeX to understand it, but in most PDFs formulas are just jumbles of letters.

Re: Show HN: Explainpaper – Explain jargon in academic papers with GPT-3

#10

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

This is genuinely neat. I may need to start playing with GPT. I am clearly missing on a lot of fun.

Original fragment:

>> summary:

The text is explaining the Transformer, a new type of AI language model. The Transformer is based solely on attention mechanisms, and is superior to existing models in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring less time to train.

>> response:

Yes, the paper says that the Transformer model is superior because it is more parallelizable and requires less time to train.

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