Understanding information-dense documents like recipes and scientific papers requires readers to find, interpret, and connect details scattered across text, figures, tables, and other visual elements. These documents are often long and filled with specialized terminology, hindering the ability to locate relevant information or piece together related ideas. Existing tools offer limited support for synthesizing information across media types. As a result, understanding complex material remains cognitively demanding. This paper presents a framework for fine-grained integration of information in complex documents. We instantiate the framework in an augmented reading interface, which populates a scientific paper with clickable points on figures, interactive highlights in the body text, and a persistent reference panel for accessing consolidated details without manual scrolling. In a controlled between-subjects study, we find that participants who read the paper with our tool achieved significantly higher scores on a reading quiz without evidence of increased time to completion or cognitive load. Fine-grained integration provides a systematic way of revealing relationships within a document, supporting engagement with complex, information-dense materials.

翻译：理解信息密集型文档（如食谱和科学论文）需要读者在文本、图表、表格和其他视觉元素中查找、解释并连接分散的细节。这类文档通常篇幅较长且包含大量专业术语，这阻碍了读者定位相关信息或整合相关概念的能力。现有工具在跨媒体类型信息综合方面提供的支持有限，导致理解复杂材料仍然具有较高的认知负荷。本文提出了一种在复杂文档中实现细粒度信息整合的框架。我们将该框架实例化为一个增强阅读界面，该界面在科学论文的图表上生成可点击标记点，在正文中创建交互式高亮，并提供一个持久参考面板，使用户无需手动滚动即可访问整合后的详细信息。在一项受控的组间研究中，我们发现使用本工具阅读论文的参与者在阅读测验中获得了显著更高的分数，且未出现完成时间增加或认知负荷加重的迹象。细粒度整合提供了一种系统化揭示文档内部关联的方法，有助于读者更好地理解复杂且信息密集的材料。