Academic publisher Springer Nature has published what is reportedly the first machine-generated book.

Created using an algorithm built by researchers at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, the first machine-generated book published by a scholarly publisher is a synopsis of the latest research publications on the topic of lithium-ion batteries.

Led by assistant professor Christian Chiarcos with the Applied Computational Linguistics (ACoLi) lab of Goethe University, the process of compiling content for the book involved an analysis of applicable publications from the content platform SpringerLink. The peer-reviewed Springer Nature publications underwent a similarity-based clustering so that source documents were arranged into logical chapters and sections. Article summaries were then constructed within the chapters as well as paraphrased text extracted from the source documents. Additionally, hyperlinks were included that enable readers to link back to the original document. Further, introductions, tables of contents and reference sections were all automatically generated.

“This publication has allowed us to demonstrate the degree to which the challenges of machine-generated publications can be solved when experts from scientific publishers collaborate with computer linguists," explained Professor Chiarcos. "The project also enabled us to better understand the expectations of authors, editors, publishers and consumers — with regard to both scientific and economic requirements."

Henning Schoenenberger, director of Product Data and Metadata Management at Springer Nature, added: "While research articles and books written by researchers and authors will continue to play a crucial role in scientific publishing, we foresee many different content types in academic publishing in the future: from yet entirely human-created content creation to a variety of blended man-machine text generation to entirely machine-generated text. This prototype is a first important milestone we reached, and it will hopefully also initiate a public debate on the opportunities, implications, challenges and potential risks of machine-generated content in scholarly publishing."