SimpleText@CLEF-2021 Call for papers

SimpleText@CLEF-2021 Call for papers

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Deadlines

  • Submissions: 30 April 2021 (AoE)
  • Notifications: 7 May 2021
  • CLEF conference: 21 - 24 September 2021

Context of the workshop

Scientific literacy, including health related questions, is important in order to allow people to make informed decisions, evaluate information quality, maintain physiological and mental health. For example, the stories individuals find credible can determine their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the application of social distancing, using dangerous fake medical treatments, or hoarding panic buying. Unfortunately, stories in social media may be easier for lay people to understand than scientific papers due to the lack of prior background knowledge or complex language and internal vernacular. Scientific texts such as research publications can also be difficult to understand for non domain-experts or scientists outside the publication domain. Improving text comprehensibility and its adaptation to different audiences remains an unresolved problem. From a societal perspective, SimpleText will be a step forward to make the research really open, accessible and understandable for everyone [1], to develop a counter-speech to fake news based on scientific results, to allow people to read faster and consequently, become more aware of scientific results, especially with an explosion of open science during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Simplified texts are also more accessible for non-native speakers [2], young readers and people with reading disabilities [3]. Also, text simplification allows the improvement of text-mining and NLP applications, including machine translation results [4]. Thus, automatic text simplification could be useful for various domains such as scientific communication, scientific journalism, politics, and education.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be written in English following the CEURART 1-column paper style and be submitted as PDF files via the EasyChair system. Papers (except extended abstracts) will be refereed through double-blind peer review. The papers should be original, i.e. not published in an earlier workshop or conference or journal, except for extended abstracts. Literature reviews, position and demo papers, papers on ongoing work or negative results are welcomed. Extended abstracts of previously published works are also welcome. We accept the following types of submissions:

  1. Extended abstracts of 500-1000 words with bibliographic references. Bibliographic references are excluded from word count. Previously published papers can be accepted as extended abstracts (please, provide a reference to your previous work in this case).
  2. Regular papers of 10-12 standard pages length with an appropriate number of references.
  3. Short papers of 5-6 standard pages length with additional pages for references. Submissions will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers.

Links:
Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=simpletext2021
Submission template: https://ceurws.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/ceurws-publishes-ceurart-paper-style/

List of Topics (not exhaustive)

  • Automated or computer-assisted scientific simplification
  • Automated or computer-assisted scientific popularization
  • Automatic synthesis of scientific texts
  • Contextualization, search for background knowledge
  • Terminology extraction
  • Generation of scientific journalism articles
  • Generation of data journalism articles
  • Visualization as a simplification method
  • Methods for assessing language complexity
  • Methods for assessing information complexity
  • Diachronic analysis of popularization/simplification
  • Extension/simplification strategy
  • Simplification of technical text, computer-assisted pre-editing of technical text
  • Technology watch
  • Alteration and distortion of scientific information
  • Analysis of the limits of existing technologies
  • …

Program Committee

  • Liana Ermakova, HCTI - EA 4249, Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest, France)
  • Eric San-Juan, Laboratoire d’Informatique d’Avignon,Institut de technologie d’ Avignon (Avignon, France)
  • Josiane Mothe, INSPE, Université de Toulouse, IRIT, UMR5505 CNRS (Toulouse, France)
  • Jaap Kamps, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam, Netherland)
  • Pavel Braslavski, Combinatorial Algebra Lab, Ural Federal University, (Yekaterinburg, Russia)
  • Patrice Bellot, Aix-Marseille Université - CNRS (LIS – INS2I) (Marseille, France)
  • Irina Ovchinnikova, Institute of Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, Sechenov University (Moscow, Russia)
  • Diana Nurbakova, LIRIS, Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, (Lyon, France)

Bibliography

[1] B. Fecher and S. Friesike, ‘Open science: one term, five schools of thought’, in Opening science, Springer, Cham, 2014, pp. 17–47.
[2] A. Siddharthan, ‘An architecture for a text simplification system’, presented at the Proceedings of the Language Engineering Conference 2002 (LEC 2002), 2002, Accessed: Nov. 20, 2020. [Online]. Available: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.9968&rank=1.
[3] K. Inui, A. Fujita, T. Takahashi, R. Iida, and T. Iwakura, ‘Text simplification for reading assistance: a project note’, in Proceedings of the second international workshop on Paraphrasing - Volume 16, USA, Jul. 2003, pp. 9–16, doi: 10.3115/1118984.1118986.
[4] E. Hasler, A. de Gispert, F. Stahlberg, A. Waite, and B. Byrne, ‘Source sentence simplification for statistical machine translation’, Comput. Speech Lang., vol. 45, no. C, pp. 221–235, Sep. 2017, doi: 10.1016/j.csl.2016.12.001.