Abstract
Although citizens agree on the importance of objective scientific information, yet they tend to avoid scientific literature due to access restrictions, its complex language or their lack of prior background knowledge. Instead, they rely on shallow information on the web or social media often published for commercial or political incentives rather than the correctness and informational value. This paper presents an overview of the CLEF 2022 SimpleText track addressing the challenges of text simplification approaches in the context of promoting scientific information access, by providing appropriate data and benchmarks, and creating a community of IR and NLP researchers working together to resolve one of the greatest challenges of today. The track provides a corpus of scientific literature abstracts and popular science requests. It features three tasks. First, content selection (what is in, or out?) challenges systems to select passages to include in a simplified summary in response to a query. Second, complexity spotting (what is unclear?) given a passage and a query, aims to rank terms/concepts that are required to be explained for understanding this passage (definitions, context, applications). Third, text simplification (rewrite this!) given a query, asks to simplify passages from scientific abstracts while preserving the main content.
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Acknowledgment
We like to acknowledge the support of the Lab Chairs of CLEF 2022, Allan Hanbury and Martin Potthast, for their help and patience.Special thanks to the University Translation Office of the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, and to Nicolas Poinsu and Ludivine Grégoire for their major impact in the train data construction and Léa Talec-Bernard and Julien Boccou for their help in evaluation of participants’ runs. We thank Josiane Mothe for reviewing papers. We also thank Alain Kerhervé, and the MaDICS (https://www.madics.fr/ateliers/simpletext/ research group.
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Ermakova, L. et al. (2022). Overview of the CLEF 2022 SimpleText Lab: Automatic Simplification of Scientific Texts. In: Barrón-Cedeño, A., et al. Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. CLEF 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13390. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13643-6_28
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