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.

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.