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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

With Google Scholar, PubMed, and other free academic databases at their fingertips, scientists may feel they have plenty of resources to trawl through the ever-growing science literature.

But a search engine unveiled on 2 November by the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [allenai.org] (AI2) in Seattle, Washington, is working towards providing something different for its users: an understanding of a paper’s content. “We’re trying to get deep into the papers and be fast and clean and usable,” says Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of AI2.

The free product, called Semantic Scholar [semanticscholar.org], is currently limited to searching about 3 million open-access papers in computer science. But the AI2 team aims to broaden that to other fields within a year, Etzioni says. His team is well financed: AI2 was founded and is backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who has given the institute more than US$20 million since 2013.

Semantic Scholar offers a few innovative features, including picking out the most important keywords and phrases from the text without relying on an author or publisher to key them in.

http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-intelligence-institute-launches-free-science-search-engine-1.18703 [nature.com]

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