University of Amsterdam at the CLEF 2024 SimpleText Track

This paper reports on the University of Amsterdam’s participation in the CLEF 2024 SimpleText track. Our overall goal is to investigate and remove barriers that prevent the general public from accessing scientific literature, hoping to promote science literacy among the general public. Our specific focus is to investigate the relation between the topical relevance and the text complexity of scientific text, as well as develop text simplification approaches for scientific text. Our main findings are the following. First, for lay person scientific passage
retrieval, both lexical and zero-shot retrieval models perform well, with only marginal loss of performance for complexity-aware models avoiding the retrieval of passages with low readability. Second, for spotting complex
concepts, relative simple approaches based on corpus statistics show competitive precision but low recall. Third, for scientific text simplification different models generate different simplifications with all reasonable overlap
with human reference simplifications. Fourth, document or abstract level text simplification incorporate discourse structure and make sentence deletions, which hold great promise to improve the output quality and succinctness
for lay users of scientific text.