I Tried Summarizing a Paper with GPT-4o—It's Surprisingly Decent
Lately, there have been a lot of AI tools for summarizing papers, right? I directly uploaded a PDF to GPT-4o and asked, 'Summarize this paper in three lines,' and it actually pulled out the key points pretty well. The downside is that when there are lots of formulas or tables, it sometimes summarizes in a confusing way. It's fine for getting a general sense, but for the real details, you still need to check the original text. What prompts do you all use when reading papers with AI?
10 answers
Oh, I was actually considering using it for summarizing papers too—sounds like it works well. But good to know that having too many tables could be an issue; I'll keep that in mind!
I've been using Claude as well, and I find it handles formula processing and table formatting a bit better than GPT-4o. Give it a try and compare.
I put 'at an expert level, omit unnecessary explanations' in my prompt, and it gives me a more concise and professional summary. Give it a try!
I've tried something similar, and GPT-4o actually handles context pretty well. I use a prompt like 'Summarize in 5 lines in Korean, including key contributions and limitations,' and it worked out fine.
Papers with lots of formulas can be really confusing. I just start by asking for an 'abstract interpretation,' then ask about unfamiliar terms separately.
I narrow down the scope by asking things like 'Summarize the main results of this paper in three sentences, omitting the experimental methods.' This definitely improves accuracy.
Do you also have it translate and summarize at the same time if the paper is in English? I use 'summarize in Korean, technical terms in English,' and it works fine.
When I summarize with GPT-4o, it sometimes misses important references, so after the summary, I additionally ask, 'Please list only 3 key cited papers.'
I think AI summaries are perfect for getting a general sense of 'oh, this is roughly what it's about.' For the details, you definitely need the original text, lol. I agree.
If there are too many formulas, it's actually better to just copy and paste the conclusion section of the paper separately and have it summarized. Feeding the entire PDF tends to confuse it more.