The most reliable and up-to-date information on health questions is in the biomedical literature, but inaccessible due to the complex language full of jargon. Domain specific scientific text simplification holds the promise to make this literature accessible to a lay audience. Therefore, we create Cochrane-auto: a large corpus of pairs of aligned sentences, paragraphs, and abstracts from biomedical abstracts and lay summaries. Experiments demonstrate that a plan-guided simplification system trained on Cochrane-auto is able to outperform a strong baseline trained on unaligned abstracts and lay summaries. More generally, our freely available corpus complementing Newsela-auto and Wiki-auto facilitates text simplification research beyond the sentence-level and direct lexical and grammatical revisions.

Abstract: We conduct a series of experiments on ranking scientific abstracts in response to popular science queries issued by non-expert users. We show that standard IR ranking models optimized on topical relevance are indeed ignoring the individual user’s context and background knowledge. We also demonstrate the viability of complexity-aware retrieval models that retrieve more accessible relevant documents or ensure these are ranked prior to more advanced documents on the topic. More generally, our results help remove some of the barriers to consulting scientific literature by non-experts and hold the potential to promote science literacy in the general public. Lay Summary: In a world of misinformation and disinformation, access to objective evidence-based scientific information is crucial. The general public ignores scientific information due to its perceived complexity, resorting to shallow information on the web or in social media. We analyze the complexity of scientific texts retrieved for a lay person’s topic, and find a great variation in text complexity. A proof of concept complexity-aware search engine is able to retrieve both relevant and accessible scientific information for a layperson’s information need.

Previous research on automatic text simplification has focused on almost exclusively on sentence-level inputs. However, the simplification of full documents cannot be tackled by naively simplifying each sentence in isolation, as this approach fails to preserve the discourse structure of the document. Recent Context-Aware Document Simplification approaches explore various models whose input goes beyond the sentence-level. These model achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Newsela-auto dataset, which requires a difficult to obtain license to use. We replicate these experiments on an open-source dataset, namely Wiki-auto, and share all training details to make future reproductions easy. Our results validate the claim that models guided by a document-level plan outperform their standard counterparts. However, they do not support the claim that simplification models perform better when they have access to a local document context. We also find that planning models do not generalize well to out-of-domain settings. Lay Summary: We have access to unprecedented amounts of information, yet the most authoritative sources may exceed a user’s language proficiency level. Text simplification technology can change the writing style while preserving the main content. Recent paragraph-level and document-level text simplification approaches outcompete traditional sentence-level approaches, and increase the understandability of complex texts.

Le grand public a tendance à éviter les sources fiables telles que la littérature scientifique en raison de leur langage complexe et du manque de connaissances nécessaires. Au lieu de cela, il s’appuie sur des sources superficielles, trouvées sur internet ou dans les médias sociaux et qui sont pourtant souvent publiées pour des raisons commerciales ou politiques, plutôt que pour leur valeur informative. La simplification des textes peut-elle contribuer à supprimer certains de ces obstacles à l’accès ? Cet article présente l’action « CLEF 2023 SimpleText » qui aborde les défis techniques et d’évaluation de l’accès à l’information scientifique pour le grand public. Nous fournissons des données réutilisables et des critères de référence pour la simplification des textes scientifiques et encourageons les recherches visant à faciliter à la compréhension des textes complexes.

The ParlaMint corpus is a multilingual corpus consisting of the parliamentary debates of seventeen European countries over a span of roughly five years. The automatically annotated versions of these corpora provide us with a wealth of linguistic information, including Named Entities. In order to further increase the research opportunities that can be created with this corpus, the linking of Named Entities to a knowledge base is a crucial step. If this can be done successfully and accurately, a lot of additional information can be gathered from the entities, such as political stance and party affiliation, not only within countries but also between the parliaments of different countries. However, due to the nature of the ParlaMint dataset, this entity linking task is challenging. In this paper, we investigate the task of linking entities from ParlaMint in different languages to a knowledge base, and evaluating the performance of three entity linking methods. We will be using DBPedia spotlight, WikiData and YAGO as the entity linking tools, and evaluate them on local politicians from several countries. We discuss two problems that arise with the entity linking in the ParlaMint corpus, namely inflection, and aliasing or the existence of name variants in text. This paper provides a first baseline on entity linking performance on multiple multilingual parliamentary debates, describes the problems that occur when attempting to link entities in ParlaMint, and makes a first attempt at tackling the aforementioned problems with existing methods.

We show that it is straightforward to train a state of the art named entity tagger (spaCy) to recognize political actors in Dutch parliamentary proceedings with high accuracy. The tagger was trained on 3.4K manually labeled examples, which were created in a modest 2.5 days work. This resource is made available on github. Besides proper nouns of persons and political parties, the tagger can recognize quite complex definite descriptions referring to cabinet ministers, ministries, and parliamentary committees. We also provide a demo search engine which employs the tagged entities in its SERP and result summaries.