# Can summarization approximate simplification? A gold standard comparison

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16181/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [Sentence Simplification with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10931/) (2017)
- [How May I Help You? Using Neural Text Simplification to Improve Downstream NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04604/) (2021)
- [SimpLex: a lexical text simplification architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07002/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study explores the overlap between text summarization and simplification outputs. While summarization evaluation methods are streamlined, simplification lacks cohesion, prompting the question: how closely can abstractive summarization resemble gold-standard simplification? We address this by applying two BART-based BRIO summarization methods to the Newsela corpus, comparing outputs with manually annotated simplifications and achieving a top ROUGE-L score of 0.654. This provides insight into where summarization and simplification outputs converge and differ.