Qlarify: Bridging Scholarly Abstracts and Papers with Recursively Expandable Summaries

As scientific literature has grown exponentially, researchers often rely on paper triaging strategies such as browsing abstracts before deciding to delve into a paper's full text. However, when an abstract is insufficient, researchers are required to navigate an informational chasm between 150-word abstracts and 10,000-word papers. To bridge that gap, we introduce the idea of recursively expandable summaries and present Qlarify, an interactive system that allows users to recursively expand an abstract by progressively incorporating additional information from a paper's full text. Starting from an abstract, users can brush over summary text to specify targeted information needs or select AI-suggested entities in the text. Responses are then generated on-demand by an LLM and appear in the form of a fluid, threaded expansion of the existing text. Each generated summary can be efficiently verified through attribution to a relevant source-passage in the paper. Through an interview study (n=9) and a field deployment (n=275) at a research conference, we use Qlarify as a technology probe to elaborate upon the expandable summaries design space, highlight how scholars benefit from Qlarify's expandable abstracts, and identify future opportunities to support low-effort and just-in-time exploration of scientific documents $\unicode{x2013}$ and other information spaces $\unicode{x2013}$ through LLM-powered interactions.