  The present study proposes LitStoryTeller, an interactive system for visually
exploring the semantic structure of a scientific article. We demonstrate how
LitStoryTeller could be used to answer some of the most fundamental research
questions, such as how a new method was built on top of existing methods, based
on what theoretical proof and experimental evidences. More importantly,
LitStoryTeller can assist users to understand the full and interesting story a
scientific paper, with a concise outline and important details. The proposed
system borrows a metaphor from screen play, and visualizes the storyline of a
scientific paper by arranging its characters (scientific concepts or
terminologies) and scenes (paragraphs/sentences) into a progressive and
interactive storyline. Such storylines help to preserve the semantic structure
and logical thinking process of a scientific paper. Semantic structures, such
as scientific concepts and comparative sentences, are extracted using existing
named entity recognition APIs and supervised classifiers, from a scientific
paper automatically. Two supplementary views, ranked entity frequency view and
entity co-occurrence network view, are provided to help users identify the
"main plot" of such scientific storylines. When collective documents are ready,
LitStoryTeller also provides a temporal entity evolution view and entity
community view for collection digestion.
