Explainpaper

Explainpaper is a web tool that helps readers understand dense academic papers by letting them highlight any confusing sentence, term, equation, or passage and get a plain-language explanation for exactly that selection. Users upload a PDF of a paper, and the highlighted explanations appear alongside the original text so the surrounding context stays visible; a chat interface also lets readers ask follow-up questions about the highlighted section or the paper as a whole. Built by ML researcher Aman Arora, Explainpaper is aimed at students, researchers, and professionals reading papers outside their core area of expertise, where jargon and unfamiliar notation are the main barrier rather than the underlying ideas. It focuses narrowly on in-context explanation of technical language rather than generating summaries, literature reviews, or citations. Because it relies on a language model to interpret technical content, explanations can occasionally be imprecise or oversimplified for highly specialized or mathematically dense material, so it's best used alongside — not instead of — careful reading of the original paper. Explainpaper offers free basic use without requiring an account.