Beyond Text Generation: Supporting Writers with Continuous Automatic Text Summaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a writing support tool that provides continuous, paragraph-wise automatic summaries to aid writers in planning, revising, and gaining insights into their drafts, demonstrating benefits in user reflection and text overview.

Contribution

It presents a novel text editor with real-time summaries at multiple levels, showcasing how NLP can support writing processes beyond traditional text generation.

Findings

Summaries helped users revise content and scope.

Users gained external perspectives on their writing.

Tool facilitated quick overview and strategic integration.

Abstract

We propose a text editor to help users plan, structure and reflect on their writing process. It provides continuously updated paragraph-wise summaries as margin annotations, using automatic text summarization. Summary levels range from full text, to selected (central) sentences, down to a collection of keywords. To understand how users interact with this system during writing, we conducted two user studies (N=4 and N=8) in which people wrote analytic essays about a given topic and article. As a key finding, the summaries gave users an external perspective on their writing and helped them to revise the content and scope of their drafted paragraphs. People further used the tool to quickly gain an overview of the text and developed strategies to integrate insights from the automated summaries. More broadly, this work explores and highlights the value of designing AI tools for writers, with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities that go beyond direct text generation and correction.