Overview of the BioLaySumm 2023 Shared Task on Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles

TL;DR

This paper reports on the BioLaySumm 2023 shared task, which challenges models to generate understandable lay summaries of biomedical research articles for non-expert audiences, highlighting the progress and insights from 20 participating teams.

Contribution

It introduces a shared task with two subtasks focused on lay summarization and readability control, providing a benchmark for future research in biomedical text simplification.

Findings

20 teams participated in the shared task

Models showed varying effectiveness in lay summary generation

Insights into current capabilities and challenges in biomedical summarization

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the shared task on Lay Summarisation of Biomedical Research Articles (BioLaySumm), hosted at the BioNLP Workshop at ACL 2023. The goal of this shared task is to develop abstractive summarisation models capable of generating "lay summaries" (i.e., summaries that are comprehensible to non-technical audiences) in both a controllable and non-controllable setting. There are two subtasks: 1) Lay Summarisation, where the goal is for participants to build models for lay summary generation only, given the full article text and the corresponding abstract as input; and 2) Readability-controlled Summarisation, where the goal is for participants to train models to generate both the technical abstract and the lay summary, given an article's main text as input. In addition to overall results, we report on the setup and insights from the BioLaySumm shared task, which attracted a total of 20 participating teams across both subtasks.