Skimming research literature was never this easy.
Scientific research is hard — at times painful. It requires performing experimentation and formulating methodologies to come up with a state-of-the-art solution. But the most painstaking part of the research is the literature review. A good literature review provides a solid research foundation upon which a researcher can build and expand his ideas. A bad one can take research on a dark path.
If scientific research is painful, literature review is excruciating. Published scientific research dates back to 1665 and millions of papers have been published since then. Oren Etzioni, CEO of Allen Institue for AI, while talking in the Heros of NLP series by Deeplearning.ai refers to the growing number of published research papers as Moore’s law of scientific publication.
“The number of papers seems to be doubling every few years.”
While we only consider the most recent and up-to-date research for the literature review, the number of relevant papers which the researchers have to read sum up to thousands. This is an ongoing challenge for researchers. Thanks to AI (NLP in particular), we finally have a solution to this problem — which is TL;DR.
TL;DR is an automatically generated short summary of a paper. It informally stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read”
Scroll to the end if you want to skip the details and find the TL;DR of this article. For visual clarity, we will skip the semi-colon in TLDR.