Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication

Yue Guo, Joseph Chee Chang, Maria Antoniak, Erin Bransom, Trevor Cohen, Lucy Wang, Tal August


Abstract
Scientific jargon can confuse researchers when they read materials from other domains. Identifying and translating jargon for individual researchers could speed up research, but current methods of jargon identification mainly use corpus-level familiarity indicators rather than modeling researcher-specific needs, which can vary greatly based on each researcher’s background. We collect a dataset of over 10K term familiarity annotations from 11 computer science researchers for terms drawn from 100 paper abstracts. Analysis of this data reveals that jargon familiarity and information needs vary widely across annotators, even within the same sub-domain (e.g., NLP). We investigate features representing domain, subdomain, and individual knowledge to predict individual jargon familiarity. We compare supervised and prompt-based approaches, finding that prompt-based methods using information about the individual researcher (e.g., personal publications, self-defined subfield of research) yield the highest accuracy, though the task remains difficult and supervised approaches have lower false positive rates. This research offers insights into features and methods for the novel task of integrating personal data into scientific jargon identification.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.255
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4535–4550
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.255
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Guo, Joseph Chee Chang, Maria Antoniak, Erin Bransom, Trevor Cohen, Lucy Wang, and Tal August. 2024. Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4535–4550, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication (Guo et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.255.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.255.copyright.pdf