CLEF 2024 SimpleText Track:
Improving Access to Scientific Texts for Everyone
The general public tends to avoid reliable sources such as scientific literature due to their complex language and lacking background knowledge. Instead, they rely on shallow and derived sources on the web and in social media - often published for commercial or political incentives, rather than informational value. Can text simplification help to remove some of these access barriers? The SimpleText track is a part of the CLEF initiative which promotes the systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks. SimpleText addresses the challenges of text simplification approaches in the context of promoting scientific information access, by providing appropriate data and benchmarks. The track uses a corpus of scientific literature abstracts and popular science requests. Our overall use case is to create a simplified summary of multiple scientific documents based on a popular science query which provides a user with an accessible overview of this specific topic.
The track has the following four concrete tasks of which SOTA? is Task 4.
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 Simply Scientific Text.
Task 4: SOTA? Tracking the State-of-the-Art in Scholarly Publications. (this website)
The track's setup is based on the following pipeline: i) select the information to be included in a simplified summary; ii) improve the readability of the scientific text; iii) provide additional background knowledge for remaining difficult concepts; and iv) aggregate information from multiple articles. For more information to participate in the first 3 tasks at the SimpleText track in CLEF 2024, please visit the track website at http://simpletext-project.com/.