Cross-lingual Science Journalism: Select, Simplify and Rewrite Summaries for Non-expert Readers

Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 1: Long Papers, pages 1843–1861 July 9-14, 2023 ©2023 Association for Computational Linguistics Cross-lingual Science Journalism: SELECT, SIMPLIFY and REWRITE Summaries for Non-expert Readers Mehwish Fatima and Michael Strube Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (mehwish.fatima|michael.strube)@h-its.org Abstract Automating Cross-lingual Science Journalism (CSJ) aims to generate popular science sum- maries from English scientific texts for non- expert readers in their local language. We in- troduce CSJ as a downstream task of text sim- plification and cross-lingual scientific summa- rization to facilitate science journalists’ work. We analyze the performance of possible ex- isting solutions as baselines for the CSJ task. Based on these findings, we propose to com- bine the three components - SELECT, SIMPLIFY and REWRITE (SSR) to produce cross-lingual simplified science summaries for non-expert readers. Our empirical evaluation on the WIKIPEDIA dataset shows that SSR significantly outperforms the baselines for the CSJ task and can serve as a strong baseline for future work. We also perform an ablation study investigat- ing the impact of individual components of SSR. Further, we analyze the performance of SSR on a high-quality, real-world CSJ dataset with hu- man evaluation and in-depth analysis, demon- strating the superior performance of SSR for CSJ. 1 Introduction Cross-lingual Science Journalism (CSJ) produces popular science stories1 from English scientific texts for non-expert readers in their local language. CSJ focuses on simultaneously reducing linguistic complexity and length of the original text. Au- tomating CSJ can facilitate science journalists in their work for writing popular science stories. A real-world example of CSJ is Spektrum der Wis- senschaft (SPEKTRUM)2. It is a popular monthly science magazine, the German version of Scientific American. The magazine is considered a bridge between scientific literature and the non-expert pub- lic. Our work is initiated by a collaboration with SPEK- 1We quote stories and summaries interchangeably in this work. 2https://www.spektrum.de/ Target: ein mädchen aus südafrika lebt seit neun jahren mit einer hiv-infektion, ohne den erreger mit medikamenten kon- trollieren zu müssen. das berichteten fachleute um avy violari von der university of the witwatersrand in johannesburg auf einer konferenz in paris. [...] Translation: a girl from south africa has been living with an hiv infection for nine years without having to control the pathogen with medication. this is what experts around avy vi- olari from the university of the witwatersrand in johannesburg reported at a conference in paris. [...] mBART: das kind, das fiziert wird mit dem hi-virus bei der geburt, ist die geburtsache für das infizieren des virus bei der geburt. die infektion des ungeborenen kindes mit dem hiv wird als latente hiv-infektion bezeichnet. die ursache für die erkrankung ist noch ungeklärt. Translation: the child who is <UNK> with the hi virus at birth is the <UNK> for infecting the virus at birth. the infec- tion of the unborn child with hiv is referred to as latent hiv infection. the cause of the disease is still unclear. SSR: ein neunjähriges kind, das ohne behandlung mit …

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