Abstract
Everyone agrees on the importance of objective scientific information. However, relevant scientific documents tend to be inherently difficult to find and understand either because of intricate terminology or the potential absence of prior knowledge among their readers. Can we improve accessibility for everyone? This paper introduces the SimpleText Track at CLEF 2024, addressing the technical and evaluation challenges associated with making scientific information accessible to a wide audience, including students and non-experts. We provide appropriate reusable data and benchmarks for scientific text summarization and simplification. The CLEF 2024 SimpleText track is based on four interrelated tasks: Task 1 Content Selection: Retrieving Passages to Include in a Simplified Summary. Task 2 Complexity Spotting: Identifying and Explaining Difficult Concepts. Task 3 Text Simplification: Simplify Scientific Text. Task 4 SOTA?: Tracking the State-of-the-Art in Scholarly Publications.
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Notes
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A joined effort with Scholarly Document Processing https://sdproc.org/2024/.
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References
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Acknowledgments
This track would not have been possible without the great support of numerous individuals. We want to thank in particular the colleagues and the students who participated in data construction, evaluation and reviewing. We also thank the MaDICS (https://www.madics.fr/ateliers/simpletext/) research group and the French National Research Agency (project ANR-22-CE23-0019-01). SimpleText’s SOTA Task is jointly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - project number: NFDI4DataScience (460234259) and the German BMBF project SCINEXT (01lS22070).
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Ermakova, L. et al. (2024). CLEF 2024 SimpleText Track. In: Goharian, N., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14613. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56072-9_4
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