Recursive summaries are a way of showing summaries of a text or conversation while also allowing readers to “explore” the parts they don’t understand or are otherwise more interested in reading the details on.
Research in the idea has been reinvigorated by the potential for LLMs to use it for allowing limited context windows to explore large amounts of data, but it originated from an MIT paper called Wikum that aimed to allow conversations on forums and elsewhere to be turned into something more wiki-like, a reference text on the given subject (a process also referred to as “message gardening”). It's also one of the ideas proposed by Chat Glue.
By making each step of expanding details more “bite size” I think this can help ease readers into getting more context without being confronted with a large wall of text. I think it would be interesting to see this further explored on the scale of entire books.
Nutshell is a library designed for “explorable explanations” that could be used as an example for integrating recursive summaries into a website.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.