an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross-sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated highlighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

an ablation study with eye-tracking (Section 5) revealed that the three key features of ABSTRACTEXPLORER's central cross- sentence relationships pane-sentence order, role-coordinated high- lighting, and alignment-work best in concert, not alone.

We conducted task-based experiments with 25 pairs of participants (50 individuals) to evaluate quantitative metrics.

AbstractExplorer used variation affordances present in prior systems, e.g., color-coordinated highlighting of analogous text in Gero et al. [18], and introduced new ones, such as alignment of sentences based on analogous chunks within them, which had only been hypothesized in prior work.

Structural Mapping Theory (SMT) is a long-standing well-vetted theory from Cognitive Science that describes how humans attend to and try to compare objects by finding mental representations of them that can be structurally mapped to each other (analogies).

AbstractExplorer instantiates new minimally lossy SMT-informed techniques for skimming, reading, and reasoning about a corpus of similarly structured short documents.

Lossless SMT-informed techniques have yet to be brought to bear in the context of researchers familiarizing themselves with a corpus of existing literature.

This SMT-informed approach, which AbstractExplorer shares, tries to give this mental machinery “a leg up,” letting users perhaps skip some steps by accepting reified cross-document relationships identified by the computer.

system designers have leveraged Structure-Mapping Theory (SMT) to facilitate seeing both the overview and the details at the same time, facilitating abstraction without losing context.

¹Structural Mapping Theory (SMT) is a long-standing well-vetted theory from Cognitive Science that describes how humans attend to and try to compare objects by finding mental representations of them that can be structurally mapped to each other (analogies).

This SMT-informed approach, which AbstractExplorer shares, tries to give this mental machinery “a leg up,” letting users perhaps skip some steps by accepting reified cross-document relationships identified by the computer. The revealed variation within these analogous cross-document relationships can invite the user’s engagement. This is the essence of comparative close reading, a dialectical activity [73] that requires repeated deep engagement with the texts to reveal new insights.

Recent prior work has shown that it is possible to help people read and reason about a corpus of short documents without employing lossy document representations. For example, for collections of code examples written with similar purposes but using different libraries, ParaLib [69] used color-coordinated role highlights to reveal cross-example commonalities and distinctions. The Positional Diction Clustering (PDC) algorithm identified analogous sentences across many LLM responses, which were reified both as color-coordinated cross-document analogous text highlighting (like ParaLib) and in a novel ‘interleaved’ view where analogous sentences across documents were rendered in adjacent rows to enable more easy comparison [18]. These examples of text-centric lossless techniques do not abstract away or summarize; they strategically re-organize and re-render the existing text to help enhance readers’ own perceptual cognition, informed by Structural Mapping Theory (SMT) [17].1 The human perceptual, comparative mental machinery that SMT describes is part of what enables humans to form more abstract structured mental models from concrete examples, among other critical knowledge tasks.