AI Tools from Oxford
AI Discovery Assistant
The AI Discovery Assistant accepts a natural language query and returns the most relevant results from across Oxford Academic resources.
"AI Discovery Assistant" is available in: Oxford Handbooks Online, and Very Short Introductions, as well as Oxford Journals.
- From either of these databases, click the "AI Discovery Assistant" in the upper right side of the page.
Enter a natural language query into the AI Discovery Assistant search box at the very bottom of the page.
- Example: why does time slow down for you the faster you travel
The search results will be the most relevant across all of Oxford Academic content.
- Some results will be accessible (see the green open-lock icon or the green "free" icon), and some will not be accessible (see the blue "get access" button).
More Information about the AI Discovery Assistant
OED AI Search Assistant
The OED AI Search Assistant constructs an advanced search from your natural language query.
"AI Search Assistant" is available in: Oxford English Dictionary
- From the OED home page, click on the "AI Search Assistant" link at the top of the page.
Enter a natural language search in the search box.
- Example: Which words did Shakespeare introduce into English
The AI Search Assistant will return a link to an advanced search that addresses your query.
- Click the link to go to the advanced search results
You can modify the search parameters on the advanced search results screen if necessary.
About the OED Search Assistant
Under the Hood
What powers Oxford's AI tools?
Oxford Academic’s “AI Discovery Assistant” uses a lightweight version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o-mini large language model and operates in a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that grounds responses in Oxford’s own content metadata—titles, abstracts, keywords, contributors, and dates. The AI reformats natural language queries as embeddings, matches them to the most relevant Oxford Academic metadata, and generates a set of ten recommended results that are strictly drawn from its internal content—not from the open web.
The OED AI Search Assistant, by contrast, is not generative and does not use an LLM or RAG for summaries or open-ended answers. Instead, it converts a user’s natural-language question into the OED’s built-in advanced search parameters using rule-based semantic parsing and deepset Cloud’s search platform, returning refined links to relevant dictionary entries and advanced search result pages. The AI Search Assistant in OED is essentially a semantic query interpreter, offering transparency on how the user’s query is translated—without generating novel text or drawing from other OUP products or the web.
AI-assisted, human-verified text