‘Don’t Get Too Technical with Me’: A Discourse Structure-Based Framework for Automatic Science Journalism

Ronald Cardenas, Bingsheng Yao, Dakuo Wang, Yufang Hou


Abstract
Science journalism refers to the task of reporting technical findings of a scientific paper as a less technical news article to the general public audience. We aim to design an automated system to support this real-world task (i.e., automatic science journalism ) by 1) introducing a newly-constructed and real-world dataset (SciTechNews), with tuples of a publicly-available scientific paper, its corresponding news article, and an expert-written short summary snippet; 2) proposing a novel technical framework that integrates a paper’s discourse structure with its metadata to guide generation; and, 3) demonstrating with extensive automatic and human experiments that our model outperforms other baseline methods (e.g. Alpaca and ChatGPT) in elaborating a content plan meaningful for the target audience, simplify the information selected, and produce a coherent final report in a layman’s style.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.76
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1186–1202
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.76
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.76
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ronald Cardenas, Bingsheng Yao, Dakuo Wang, and Yufang Hou. 2023. ‘Don’t Get Too Technical with Me’: A Discourse Structure-Based Framework for Automatic Science Journalism. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1186–1202, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
‘Don’t Get Too Technical with Me’: A Discourse Structure-Based Framework for Automatic Science Journalism (Cardenas et al., EMNLP 2023)
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