BioLaySumm 2024
The 2nd Shared Task on the Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles @BioNLP Workshop, ACL 2024
Biomedical publications contain the latest research on prominent health-related topics, ranging from common illnesses to global pandemics. This can often result in their content being of interest to a wide variety of audiences including researchers, medical professionals, journalists, and even members of the public. However, the highly technical and specialist language used within such articles typically makes it difficult for non-expert audiences to understand their contents. The BioLaySumm shared task surrounds the abstractive summarization of biomedical articles, with an emphasis on catering to non-expert audiences through the generation of summaries that are more readable, containing more background information and less technical terminology (i.e., a “lay summary”).
This is the 2nd iteration of BioLaySumm, following the success of the 1st edition of the task at BioNLP 2023 which attracted 56 submissions across 20 different teams. In this edition, which is again to be hosted by the BioNLP workshop https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/BioNLP_Workshop at ACL 2024, we aim to build on last year’s task by introducing a new test set, updating our evaluation protocol, and encouraging participants to explore novel approaches that will help to further advance the state-of-the-art for Lay Summarization. Accordingly, we will not only be offering a prize of £100 to the team with the top-ranking submission, but we will also offer a second prize of £50 to the team that proposes the most innovative approach (as decided upon by the task organizers).
For more information, see:
- Main site: https://biolaysumm.org/
- CodaBench site: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1920/
Important dates:
- First call for participation: 22nd January, 2024
- Releasing of task data: 22nd January, 2024
- System submission deadline: May 6th, 2024
- System papers due date: May 20th, 2024
- Notification of acceptance: June 17th, 2024
- Camera-ready system papers due: July 1st, 2024
- BioNLP Workshop Date: August 16th, 2024
Organizers:
- Tomas Goldsack, University of Sheffield, UK
- Matthew Shardlow, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
- Carolina Scarton, University of Sheffield, UK
- Chenghua Lin, University of Manchester, UK