SimpleText@CLEF-2021 Home

Home	Call for papers	Important dates	Pilot tasks
Program	Publications	Organisers	Contact

SimpleText-2021: (Re)Telling right scientific stories to non-specialists via text simplification

SimpleText is a new workshop organised as a part of CLEF-2021 conference, initiated by CLEF initiative.

News stories judged to be true according to fact-checkers spread more slowly than fake news and reach fewer people. Stories the individuals find credible can determine their behaviour, e.g. response to the pandemic, the application of social distancing, using dangerous fake medical treatments, etc. Fake news plays on people’s emotions, but they are also easier to understand by non-professionals than the research papers.

Since scientific publications are difficult for people outside the domain and so they do not read them at all even if they are accessible. Popularization of science is one of UNESCO’s oldest programs, but human simplification of scientific documents is expensive and time consuming. Users cannot have an instant, simplified summary on a specific topic they are interested in.

To put a step forward to resolve this problem we propose a new workshop called SimpleText which aims to create a community interested in generating a simplified summary of scientific documents and to contribute in making the science really open & accessible for everyone. The goal is to generate a simplified abstract of multiple scientific documents based on a given query. In the first year, we plan to run two pilot tasks:

(1) given a scientific text, provide background information from an external source to help a user to understand it;

(2) given a short scientific text (e.g. abstract), generate its simplified version.

Keywords:

Scientific text simplification
Science popularisation
Scientific journalism
Contextualization
Background knowledge