# Making Science Simple: Corpora for the Lay Summarisation of Scientific Literature

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [ScispaCy: Fast and Robust Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07669/) (2019)
- [BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03741/) (2019)
- [TLDR: Extreme Summarization of Scientific Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15011/) (2020)
- [PubMed 200k RCT: a Dataset for Sequential Sentence Classification in Medical Abstracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06071/) (2017)
- [Pretrained Language Models for Sequential Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04054/) (2019)
- [Paragraph-level Simplification of Medical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05767/) (2021)
- [EASSE: Easier Automatic Sentence Simplification Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04567/) (2019)
- [Automated Lay Language Summarization of Biomedical Scientific Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12573/) (2020)
- [PySBD: Pragmatic Sentence Boundary Disambiguation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09657/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17529/) (2023)
- [FactKB: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation using Language Models Enhanced with Factual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08281/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT vs Human-authored Text: Insights into Controllable Text Summarization and Sentence Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07799/) (2023)
- [Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05151/) (2025)
- [SciRIFF: A Resource to Enhance Language Model Instruction-Following over Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07835/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Benchmark Biomedical Text Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04270/) (2023)
- [Generating Summaries with Controllable Readability Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10623/) (2023)
- [Paper2Video: Automatic Video Generation from Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05096/) (2025)
- [RAG-RLRC-LaySum at BioLaySumm: Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Readability Control for Layman Summarization of Biomedical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13179/) (2024)
- [Retrieval augmentation of large language models for lay language generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03818/) (2022)
- [Overview of the BioLaySumm 2024 Shared Task on the Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08566/) (2024)
- [Incorporating Distributions of Discourse Structure for Long Document Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16784/) (2023)
- [README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15561/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Evaluating Large Language Model Applications in the Medical Industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15777/) (2024)
- [DeTiME: Diffusion-Enhanced Topic Modeling using Encoder-decoder based LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15296/) (2023)
- [SciNews: From Scholarly Complexities to Public Narratives -- A Dataset for Scientific News Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17768/) (2024)
- [The Iron(ic) Melting Pot: Reviewing Human Evaluation in Humour, Irony and Sarcasm Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05552/) (2023)
- [RST-LoRA: A Discourse-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation for Long Document Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00657/) (2024)
- [RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19109/) (2024)
- [ReadCtrl: Personalizing text generation with readability-controlled instruction learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09205/) (2024)
- [Improving Biomedical Abstractive Summarisation with Knowledge Aggregation from Citation Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15684/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Biomedical Lay Summarisation with External Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15702/) (2023)
- [Overview of the BioLaySumm 2023 Shared Task on Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17332/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Model Summarizers Adapt to Diverse Scientific Communication Goals?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10415/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Evaluators: Are readability metrics good measures of readability?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19221/) (2025)
- [Magical: Medical Lay Language Generation via Semantic Invariance and Layperson-tailored Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08730/) (2025)
- [Automatic and Human-AI Interactive Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03878/) (2023)
- [P^3SUM: Preserving Author's Perspective in News Summarization with Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09741/) (2023)
- [Compressing Language Models for Specialized Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18424/) (2025)
- [Explanatory Summarization with Discourse-Driven Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19339/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.