Finding evidence for claims from content presented in experimental results of scientific articles is difficult. The evidence is often presented in the form of tables and figures, and correctly matching it to scientific claims presents automation challenges. The Context24 shared task is launched to support the development of systems able to verify claims by extracting supporting evidence from articles. We explore different facets of this shared task modelled as a search problem and as an information extraction task. We experiment with a range of methods in each of these categories for the two sub-tasks of evidence identification and grounding context identification in the Context24 shared task.

Lay summarisation aims at generating a summary for non-expert audience which allows them to keep updated with latest research in a specific field. Despite the significant advancements made in the field of text summarisation, lay summarisation remains relatively under-explored. We present a comprehensive set of experiments and analysis to investigate the effectiveness of existing pre-trained language models in generating lay summaries. When evaluate our models using a BioNLP Shared Task, BioLaySumm, our submission ranked second for the relevance criteria and third overall among 21 competing teams.

Prompt-based usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) is an increasingly popular way to tackle many well-known natural language problems. This trend is due, in part, to the appeal of the In-Context Learning (ICL) prompt set-up, in which a few selected training examples are provided along with the inference request. ICL, a type of few-shot learning, is especially attractive for natural language processing (NLP) tasks defined for specialised domains, such as entity extraction from scientific documents, where the annotation is very costly due to expertise requirements for the annotators. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of in-context sample selection methods for entity extraction from scientific documents using GPT-3.5 and compare these results against a fully supervised transformer-based baseline. Our results indicate that the effectiveness of the in-context sample selection methods is heavily domain-dependent, but the improvements are more notable for problems with a larger number of entity types. More in-depth analysis shows that ICL is more effective for low-resource set-ups of scientific information extraction

Transformer encoder models exhibit strong performance in single-domain applications. However, in a cross-domain situation, using a sub-word vocabulary model results in sub-word overlap. This is an issue when there is an overlap between sub-words that share no semantic similarity between domains. We hypothesize that alleviating this overlap allows for a more effective modeling of multi-domain tasks; we consider the biomedical and general domains in this paper. We present a study on reducing sub-word overlap by scaling the vocabulary size in a Transformer encoder model while pretraining with multiple domains. We observe a significant increase in downstream performance in the general-biomedical cross-domain from a reduction in sub-word overlap.