To broaden the dissemination of scientific knowledge to diverse audiences, scientific document summarization must simultaneously control multiple attributes such as length and empirical focus. However, existing research typically focuses on controlling single attributes, leaving the compositional control of multiple attributes underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CCSBench, a benchmark for compositional controllable summarization in the scientific domain. Our benchmark enables fine-grained control over both explicit attributes (e.g., length), which are objective and straightforward, and implicit attributes (e.g., empirical focus), which are more subjective and conceptual. We conduct extensive experiments on GPT-4, LLaMA2, and other popular LLMs under various settings. Our findings reveal significant limitations in large language models' ability to balance trade-offs between control attributes, especially implicit ones that require deeper understanding and abstract reasoning.
Scientific document summarization has been a challenging task due to the long structure of the input text. The long input hinders the simultaneous effective modeling of both global high-order relations between sentences and local intra-sentence relations which is the most critical step in extractive summarization. However, existing methods mostly focus on one type of relation, neglecting the simultaneous effective modeling of both relations, which can lead to insufficient learning of semantic representations. In this paper, we propose HAESum, a novel approach utilizing graph neural networks to locally and globally model documents based on their hierarchical discourse structure. First, intra-sentence relations are learned using a local heterogeneous graph. Subsequently, a novel hypergraph self-attention layer is introduced to further enhance the characterization of high-order inter-sentence relations. We validate our approach on two benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HAESum and the importance of considering hierarchical structures in modeling long scientific documents. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/MoLICHENXI/HAESum}
The extended structural context has made scientific paper summarization a challenging task. This paper proposes CHANGES, a contrastive hierarchical graph neural network for extractive scientific paper summarization. CHANGES represents a scientific paper with a hierarchical discourse graph and learns effective sentence representations with dedicated designed hierarchical graph information aggregation. We also propose a graph contrastive learning module to learn global theme-aware sentence representations. Extensive experiments on the PubMed and arXiv benchmark datasets prove the effectiveness of CHANGES and the importance of capturing hierarchical structure information in modeling scientific papers.
Lay summarisation aims to jointly summarise and simplify a given text, thus making its content more comprehensible to non-experts. Automatic approaches for lay summarisation can provide significant value in broadening access to scientific literature, enabling a greater degree of both interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and public understanding when it comes to research findings. However, current corpora for this task are limited in their size and scope, hindering the development of broadly applicable data-driven approaches. Aiming to rectify these issues, we present two novel lay summarisation datasets, PLOS (large-scale) and eLife (medium-scale), each of which contains biomedical journal articles alongside expert-written lay summaries. We provide a thorough characterisation of our lay summaries, highlighting differing levels of readability and abstractiveness between datasets that can be leveraged to support the needs of different applications. Finally, we benchmark our datasets using mainstream summarisation approaches and perform a manual evaluation with domain experts, demonstrating their utility and casting light on the key challenges of this task.
This paper presents an unsupervised extractive approach to summarize scientific long documents based on the Information Bottleneck principle. Inspired by previous work which uses the Information Bottleneck principle for sentence compression, we extend it to document level summarization with two separate steps. In the first step, we use signal(s) as queries to retrieve the key content from the source document. Then, a pre-trained language model conducts further sentence search and edit to return the final extracted summaries. Importantly, our work can be flexibly extended to a multi-view framework by different signals. Automatic evaluation on three scientific document datasets verifies the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The further human evaluation suggests that the extracted summaries cover more content aspects than previous systems.
Lay summarization aims to generate lay summaries of scientific papers automatically. It is an essential task that can increase the relevance of science for all of society. In this paper, we build a lay summary generation system based on the BART model. We leverage sentence labels as extra supervision signals to improve the performance of lay summarization. In the CL-LaySumm 2020 shared task, our model achieves 46.00\% Rouge1-F1 score.
Scientific article summarization is challenging: large, annotated corpora are not available, and the summary should ideally include the article's impacts on research community. This paper provides novel solutions to these two challenges. We 1) develop and release the first large-scale manually-annotated corpus for scientific papers (on computational linguistics) by enabling faster annotation, and 2) propose summarization methods that integrate the authors' original highlights (abstract) and the article's actual impacts on the community (citations), to create comprehensive, hybrid summaries. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of our corpus in training data-driven models for scientific paper summarization and the advantage of our hybrid summaries over abstracts and traditional citation-based summaries. Our large annotated corpus and hybrid methods provide a new framework for scientific paper summarization research.
This overview describes the official results of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task 2018 -- the first medium-scale shared task on scientific document summarization in the computational linguistics (CL) domain. This year, the dataset comprised 60 annotated sets of citing and reference papers from the open access research papers in the CL domain. The Shared Task was organized as a part of the 41st Annual Conference of the Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), held in Ann Arbor, USA in July 2018. We compare the participating systems in terms of two evaluation metrics. The annotated dataset and evaluation scripts can be accessed and used by the community from: \url{https://github.com/WING-NUS/scisumm-corpus}.
The CL-SciSumm Shared Task is the first medium-scale shared task on scientific document summarization in the computational linguistics~(CL) domain. In 2019, it comprised three tasks: (1A) identifying relationships between citing documents and the referred document, (1B) classifying the discourse facets, and (2) generating the abstractive summary. The dataset comprised 40 annotated sets of citing and reference papers of the CL-SciSumm 2018 corpus and 1000 more from the SciSummNet dataset. All papers are from the open access research papers in the CL domain. This overview describes the participation and the official results of the CL-SciSumm 2019 Shared Task, organized as a part of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), held in Paris, France in July 2019. We compare the participating systems in terms of two evaluation metrics and discuss the use of ROUGE as an evaluation metric. The annotated dataset used for this shared task and the scripts used for evaluation can be accessed and used by the community at: https://github.com/WING-NUS/scisumm-corpus.
The rapid growth of scientific literature has made it difficult for the researchers to quickly learn about the developments in their respective fields. Scientific document summarization addresses this challenge by providing summaries of the important contributions of scientific papers. We present a framework for scientific summarization which takes advantage of the citations and the scientific discourse structure. Citation texts often lack the evidence and context to support the content of the cited paper and are even sometimes inaccurate. We first address the problem of inaccuracy of the citation texts by finding the relevant context from the cited paper. We propose three approaches for contextualizing citations which are based on query reformulation, word embeddings, and supervised learning. We then train a model to identify the discourse facets for each citation. We finally propose a method for summarizing scientific papers by leveraging the faceted citations and their corresponding contexts. We evaluate our proposed method on two scientific summarization datasets in the biomedical and computational linguistics domains. Extensive evaluation results show that our methods can improve over the state of the art by large margins.