Traditionally, Text Simplification is treated as a monolingual translation task where sentences between source texts and their simplified counterparts are aligned for training. However, especially for longer input documents, summarizing the text (or dropping less relevant content altogether) plays an important role in the simplification process, which is currently not reflected in existing datasets. Simultaneously, resources for non-English languages are scarce in general and prohibitive for training new solutions. To tackle this problem, we pose core requirements for a system that can jointly summarize and simplify long source documents. We further describe the creation of a new dataset for joint Text Simplification and Summarization based on German Wikipedia and the German children’s encyclopedia “Klexikon”, consisting of almost 2,900 documents. We release a document-aligned version that particularly highlights the summarization aspect, and provide statistical evidence that this resource is well suited to simplification as well. Code and data are available on Github: https://github.com/dennlinger/klexikon

This work presents the entry by the team from Heidelberg University in the CL-SciSumm 2020 shared task at the Scholarly Document Processing workshop at EMNLP 2020. As in its previous iterations, the task is to highlight relevant parts in a reference paper, depending on a citance text excerpt from a citing paper. We participated in tasks 1A (citation identification) and 1B (citation context classification). Contrary to most previous works, we frame Task 1A as a search relevance problem, and introduce a 2-step re-ranking approach, which consists of a preselection based on BM25 in addition to positional document features, and a top-k re-ranking with BERT. For Task 1B, we follow previous submissions in applying methods that deal well with low resources and imbalanced classes.