Researchers in any subject will have a dream; given a bunch of books provide a summary of the research. It saves time; may not gaining much knowledge. Still, this will reduce, the volume of the haystack to find the needle. Survey of literature will never be as simple as that. Is that a daydream? Not really!!! Recent advances in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving that this is a possibility. Recent news from Springer sheds light to a new direction in Machine Assisted book writing.

Springer Research announced a machine generated book about ‘Lithium-Ion Batteries’ [1]. According to the Springer site “This is the first machine-generated scientific book in chemistry published by Springer Nature. Serving as an innovative prototype defining the current status of the technology, it also provides an overview of the latest trends of lithium-ion batteries research.” [2] The book is made available as a free/open book to all. This book may be the first attempt from a publisher to come up with a machine-generated research summary. The good part of such an initiative is the acceleration it provides to many subject areas such as life sciences and fundamental sciences.

Springer worked with Applied Computational Linguistics Lab Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany to achieve the goal [3]. The team mentioned that they are using “brings together contemporary machine learning techniques with established rules-based methods that are the current industry standard” (Translated with the help of Google Translate). The team mentioned that they are developing this as an open source project. At this point, it is tough to say if it is Deep Learning ;-). There are no published papers on the methodology used by the research group. This research is going to change the perspective about the scientific publication process, and thesis writing may be. Automatic summarisation on the selected research area will be a time saver for researchers. They save many human hours in creating the summary. Further developments in this research area will be a quantum leap in literature discovery.

I am excited to read the research report from ACL researchers.

[1] Lithium-Ion Batteries, A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-16800-1#about, (Last Accessed 04/23/2019)

[2] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-16800-1#about, (Last Accessed 04/23/2019)

[3] http://www.acoli.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/projects.html, (Last Accessed 04/23/2019)