Terminology

Updated on
August 18, 2022
by
Willem

Cell
A table cell in the table view. This can be clicked to show more information and get suggested snippets.


Concept
A label for what you are looking for in a document. Create a concept to save highlighted text and to get suggested snippets from Lateral's AI. As you save more snippets, Lateral gets a better understanding of what you are looking for and helps you find it.


Dashboard
The Dashboard is you home screen, which shows an overview of all your projects. The sidebar also shows how many pages you have left and you can navigate the admin pages. In the header you can log out, see help pages or see what's new in Lateral.


Document

A PDF that is added to a project. We may support further file types in the future.


Document View
This is the web-based PDF reader that is part of every project in Lateral. It helps you read and switch between your documents. It lets you highlight text and suggests snippets for each concept based on previous highlights.

Export
In Lateral you are able to export you table view to different formats, such as Word or Excel. As well as a bibliography as a BibTex for integration with reference managers.


Flag

When you save a snippet in Lateral you can added a red, yellow or green flag to it. This helps you quickly categorise snippets.


Members
You are a member of your workspace, as is anyone you invite to your workspace. By default everyone in your workspace is an Admin, meaning they have full access to the entire workspace, all projects and can make changes everywhere. For more granular permissions you will be able to subscribe to our group or labs tiers (coming soon).


Note

When you save a snippet in Lateral you can a note. Add thoughts or summarise the text in your own words. Notes also appear in exports to Words, Excel and CSV.


OCR credits
Some scanned and more complex documents/papers require OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to get text out of them. You can click Use OCR button in the bottom left of the Document View to use OCR. When you upload documents Lateral will also notify you if it thinks there was an error processing the document.


Pages
Pages refer to pages in a document/paper. When you upload a document Lateral uses machine learning to process the document for you and breaks it down into different parts so you can search and get suggestions. The page quota shows how many pages you have left for processing. Deleting documents does not restore quota, as the processing has taken place and therefore is unlike storage.


Public Table
You can make your table public, so that people with the public link can access your table. The public view does not include the Super Search or Document View, so people will not be able to read the documents. It simply shows the table view with the list of documents and findings in the cells. Great for sharing with Supervisors or as part of your published work.


Similar Snippets

Lateral AI uses machine learning to show you similar text snippets to search results in the Super Search. This helps you quickly find contextually similar passages of text based on all the words that appear in the search results.


Snippet
When you add documents to a project, Lateral breaks these down into text "snippets". These are often paragraphs and enable features like searching across all your documents (Super Search) and AI suggestions of similar text.


Suggested Snippets
For each concept you create Lateral AI shows you suggested similar "snippets". In other words, text that is conceptually similar to all the text you have labelled with that concept so far.


Table View
This is the main view in every project in Lateral. It provides you with a clear overview of all your documents and findings. It is exportable to Word and Excel. Publicly sharable for example with supervisors.


What's New
This button can be found in the header of the Dashboard. Here you can see the new features that have been released (changelog) or announcements around the Lateral app!


Workspace
Everything you do in Lateral happens in a workspace. When you sign-up a personal workspace is created for you. You can invite others to your workspace and be invited to other people's workspaces. If you need an extra workspace please let us know.

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