Thailand

Lay summarization is essential but challenging, as it simplifies scientific information for non-experts and keeps them updated with the latest scientific knowledge. In our participation in the Shared Task: Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles @ BioNLP Workshop (Goldsack et al., 2024), ACL 2024, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation on abstractive summarization of biomedical literature using Large Language Models (LLMs) and assessed the performance using ten metrics across three categories: relevance, readability, and factuality, using eLife and PLOS datasets provided by the organizers. We developed a two-stage framework for lay summarization of biomedical scientific articles. In the first stage, we generated summaries using BART and PEGASUS LLMs by fine-tuning them on the given datasets. In the second stage, we combined the generated summaries and input them to BioBART, and then fine-tuned it on the same datasets. Our findings show that combining general and domain-specific LLMs enhances performance.

ACL 2024

BioLay_AK_SS at BioLaySumm: Domain Adaptation by Two-Stage Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models used for Biomedical Lay Summary Generation

biomedical summarization

text summarization

large language models

natural language processing

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

workshop paper

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

The main challenge in learning image-conditioned robotic policies is acquiring a visual representation conducive to low-level control. Due to the high dimensionality of the image space, learning a good visual representation requires a considerable amount of visual data. However, when learning in the real world, data is expensive. Sim2Real is a promising paradigm for overcoming data scarcity in the real-world target domain by using a simulator to collect large amounts of cheap data closely related to the target task. However, it is difficult to transfer an image-conditioned policy from sim to real when the domains are very visually dissimilar. To bridge the sim2real visual gap, we propose using natural language descriptions of images as a unifying signal across domains that captures the underlying task-relevant semantics. Our key insight is that if two image observations from different domains are labeled with similar language, the policy should predict similar action distributions for both images. We demonstrate that training the image encoder to predict the language description or the distance between descriptions of a sim or real image serves as a useful, data-efficient pretraining step that helps learn a domain-invariant image representation. We can then use this image encoder as the backbone of an IL policy trained simultaneously on a large amount of simulated and a handful of real demonstrations. Our approach outperforms widely used prior sim2real methods and strong vision-language pretraining baselines by 25 to 40%. See additional videos and materials at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/lang4sim2real/.

Natural Language Can Facilitate Sim2Real Transfer

Verbs describe the dynamics of interactions between people, objects, and their environments. They play a crucial role in language formation and understanding. Nonetheless, recent vision-language models like CLIP predominantly rely on nouns and have a limited account of verbs. This limitation affects their performance in tasks requiring action recognition and scene understanding. In this work, we introduce VerbCLIP, a verb-centric vision-language model which learns meanings of verbs based on a compositional approach to statistical machine learning. Our methods significantly outperform CLIP in zero-shot performance on the VALSE, VL-Checklist, and SVO-Probes datasets, with improvements of +2.38%, +3.14%, and +1.47%, without fine-tuning. Fine-tuning resulted in further improvements, with gains of +2.85% and +9.2% on the VALSE and VL-Checklist datasets.

VerbCLIP: Improving Verb Understanding in Vision-Language Models with Compositional Structures

This paper details the efforts of the WisPerMed team in the BioLaySumm2024 Shared Task on automatic lay summarization in the biomedical domain, aimed at making scientific publications accessible to non-specialists. Large language models (LLMs), specifically the BioMistral and Llama3 models, were fine-tuned and employed to create lay summaries from complex scientific texts. The summarization performance was enhanced through various approaches, including instruction tuning, few-shot learning, and prompt variations tailored to incorporate specific context information. The experiments demonstrated that fine-tuning generally led to the best performance across most evaluated metrics. Few-shot learning notably improved the models' ability to generate relevant and factually accurate texts, particularly when using a well-crafted prompt. Additionally, a Dynamic Expert Selection (DES) mechanism to optimize the selection of text outputs based on readability and factuality metrics was developed. Out of 54 participants, the WisPerMed team reached the 4th place, measured by readability, factuality, and relevance. Determined by the overall score, our approach improved upon the baseline by approx. 5.5 percentage points and was only approx. 1.5 percentage points behind the first place.

WisPerMed at BioLaySumm: Adapting Autoregressive Large Language Models for Lay Summarization of Scientific Articles

This article presents our submission to the Bio-
LaySumm 2024 shared task: Lay Summarization
of Biomedical Research Articles. The objective
of this task is to generate summaries
that are simplified in a concise and less technical
way, in order to facilitate comprehension
by non-experts users. A pre-trained BioBART
model was employed to fine-tune the articles
from the two journals, thereby generating two
models, one for each journal. The submission
achieved the 12th best ranking in the task, attaining
a meritorious first place in the Relevance
ROUGE-1 metric.

HULAT-UC3M at BiolaySumm: Adaptation of BioBART and Longformer models to summarizing biomedical documents

Lay summarization of biomedical research articles is a challenging problem due to their use of technical terms and background knowledge requirements, despite the potential benefits of these research articles to the public. We worked on this problem as participating in BioLaySumm 2024. We experimented with various fine-tuning approaches to generate better lay summaries for biomedical research articles. After several experiments, we built a LoRA model with unsupervised fine-tuning based on the abstracts of the given articles, followed by a post-processing unit to take off repeated sentences. Our model was ranked 3rd overall in the BioLaySumm 2024 leaderboard. We analyzed the different approaches we experimented with and suggested several ideas to improve our model further.

Saama Technologies at BioLaySumm: Abstract based fine-tuned models with LoRA

The BioLaySumm 2024 shared task at the ACL 2024 BioNLP workshop aims to transform biomedical research articles into lay summaries suitable for a broad audience, including children. We utilize the BioBART model, designed for the biomedical sector, to convert complex scientific data into clear, concise summaries. Our dataset, which includes a range of scientific abstracts, enables us to address the diverse information needs of our audience. This focus ensures that our summaries are accessible to both general and younger lay audience. Additionally, we employ specialized tokens and augmentation techniques to optimize the model's performance. 
Our methodology proved effective, earning us the 7th rank on the final leaderboard out of 57 participants.

AUTH at BioLaySumm 2024: Bringing Scientific Content to Kids

In this paper, we present our approach to the BioLaySumm 2024 Shared Task on Lay Sum-
marization of Biomedical Research Articles at BioNLP workshop 2024. The task aims to generate lay summaries from the abstract and main texts of biomedical research articles, making them understandable to lay audiences. We used some preprocessing techniques and finetuned FLAN-T5 models for the summarization task. Our method achieved an AlignScore of 0.9914 and a SummaC metric score of 0.944.

Eulerian at BioLaySumm: Preprocessing Over Abstract is All You Need

Lay summarization aims to generate summaries of technical articles for non-experts, enabling easy comprehension for a general audience. The technical language used in research often hinders effective communication of scientific knowledge, making it difficult for non-experts to understand. Automatic lay summarization can enhance access to scientific literature, promoting interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and public understanding. This has become especially important for biomedical articles, given the current global need for clear medical information. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their remarkable language understanding capabilities, are ideal for abstractive summarization, helping to make complex information accessible to the public. This paper details our submissions to the BioLaySumm 2024 Shared Task: Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles. We fine-tune and evaluate sequence-to-sequence models like T5 across various training dataset settings and optimization methods such as LoRA for lay summarization. Our submission achieved the 53rd position overall.

HGP-NLP at BioLaySumm: Leveraging LoRA for Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles using Seq2Seq Transformers

Lay summaries play a crucial role in making scientific research accessible to a wider audience. However, generating lay summaries from lengthy articles poses significant challenges. We consider two approaches to address this issue: Hard Truncation, which preserves the most informative initial portion of the article, and Text Chunking, which segments articles into smaller, manageable chunks. Our workflow encompasses data preprocessing, augmentation, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning large language models. We explore the influence of pretrained model selection, inference prompt design, and hyperparameter tuning on summarization performance. Our methods demonstrate effectiveness in generating high-quality, informative lay summaries, achieving the second-best performance in the BioLaySumm shared task at BioNLP 2024.

Ctyun AI at BioLaySumm: Enhancing Lay Summaries of Biomedical Articles Through Large Language Models and Data Augmentation

As the scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has dramatically enhanced their capabilities, there has been a growing focus on the alignment problem to ensure their responsible and ethical use. While existing alignment efforts predominantly concentrate on universal values such as the HHH principle, the aspect of culture, which is inherently pluralistic and diverse, has not received adequate attention. This work introduces a new benchmark, CDEval, aimed at evaluating the cultural dimensions of LLMs. CDEval is constructed by incorporating both GPT-4's automated generation and human verification, covering six cultural dimensions across seven domains. Our comprehensive experiments provide intriguing insights into the culture of mainstream LLMs, highlighting both consistencies and variations across different dimensions and domains. The findings underscore the importance of integrating cultural considerations in LLM development, particularly for applications in diverse cultural settings. This benchmark serves as a valuable resource for cultural studies in LLMs, paving the way for more culturally aware and sensitive models.

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