We process this data in a three-stage pipeline (Figure 6). In the first stage, Sentence Segmentation and Categorization, abstracts are split into individual sentences using the NLTK package, and each sentence is classified into one of the five pre-defined aspects as listed in Section 4.1.1. Classification is performed by prompting an LLM (see prompt used in Appendix D.1) with the sentence and its full abstract.

Then, we segment sentences within each aspect into grammar-preserving chunks (see prompt used in Appendix D.2). This results in grammatically coherent chunks that are the basis of structure patterns. After identifying chunk boundaries, we again prompt an LLM to generate labels for chunks in a human-in-the-loop approach: starting from an initial set of labels for chunk roles, when a new label is generated, a researcher from the research team examines the new label and merges it with existing labels if appropriate, controlling for the total number of labels.

In this study, we allowed participants to experience views of same-aspect sentences (Section 4.1.1) with different combinations of highlighting, ordering, and alignment (as described in Section 4.1.2 and Section 4.1.4) enabled or not, in order to understand which and/or what combinations most effectively supported users' ability to skim and read laterally across documents.

Inspired by GP-TSM [24], AbstractExplorer first segments sentences into grammar-preserving chunks—segments that respect grammatical boundaries, i.e., an LLM judges that the sentence can be truncated at that chunk boundary without breaking the grammatical integrity of the preceding text. Each chunk is then classified by an LLM as having one of nine pre-defined roles, each of which has its own assigned color.

AbstractExplorer classifies sentences into five pre-defined aspects common in CHI abstracts: Problem Domain, Gaps in Prior Work, Methodology/Contribution, Results/Findings, and Discussion/Conclusion.