Cited by 173Advanced Text Analysis TechniquesTopic ModelingText Readability and Simplification

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 63 of the 63 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 10 of the 21 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

TLDR: Extreme Summarization of Scientific Documents

Open access
Cachola, Isabel, Lo, Kyle, Cohan, Arman, Weld, Daniel·2020·Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Abstract

We introduce TLDR generation, a new form of extreme summarization, for scientific papers.TLDR generation involves high source compression and requires expert background knowledge and understanding of complex domain-specific language.To facilitate study on this task, we introduce SCITLDR, a new multi-target dataset of 5.4K TLDRs over 3.2K papers.SCITLDR contains both author-written and expert-derived TLDRs, where the latter are collected using a novel annotation protocol that produces high-quality summaries while minimizing annotation burden.We propose CATTS, a simple yet effective learning strategy for generating TLDRs that exploits titles as an auxiliary training signal.CATTS improves upon strong baselines under both automated metrics and human evaluations.Data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/allenai/scitldr. Dataset constructionOverview We introduce SCITLDR, a new multitarget dataset of 5,411 TLDRs over 3,229 scientific papers in the computer science domain.3 The training set contains 1,992 papers, each with a single gold TLDR.The dev and test sets contain 619 and 618 papers each, with 1,452 and 1,967 TLDRs, respectively.This is unlike the majority of existing 3 See Appendix Table 9 for full venue breakdown.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

The paper introduces TLDR generation for scientific papers and releases SciTLDR, a multi-target dataset of 5,411 TLDRs over 3,229 computer science papers. It proposes CATTS, which uses paper titles as an auxiliary training signal, and reports improvements over strong extractive and abstractive baselines on automated and human evaluations.

Key findings

  • SciTLDR contains 5,411 TLDRs over 3,229 papers: 1,992 training papers with one gold TLDR each, 619 dev papers with 1,452 TLDRs, and 618 test papers with 1,967 TLDRs. Its summaries average 21 words, with a compression ratio of 238.1 and 15.2% novel words.
  • Author-written TLDRs average 18.9 words and peer-review-derived TLDRs average 22.9 words; lexical overlap is very low (1-, 2-, and 3-gram mean Jaccard indices of 15.0%, 2.5%, and 0.7%). TLDR-PR is more abstractive, with 20.2% novel words versus 9.6% for TLDR-Auth.
  • CATTS improves over BART baselines: in abstract-only input, CATTS gains +0.5 Rouge-1 and CATTS_XSUM gains +1.8 Rouge-1; in AIC input, CATTS gains +2.0 Rouge-1 and CATTS_XSUM gains +0.9 Rouge-1. In AIC, CATTS reaches 44.9 Rouge-1, 22.6 Rouge-2, and 37.3 Rouge-L versus BART’s 42.9/20.8/35.1.
  • Human evaluation found CATTS_XSUM more informative than BART_XSUM (MRR 0.54 vs 0.42), comparable to gold TLDR-Auth (0.53) but below TLDR-PR (0.60). Correctness did not differ: both models averaged 2.5, with 42 ties, 10 cases favoring BART_XSUM, and 12 favoring CATTS_XSUM.

Methods

  • Dataset construction combined author-written TLDRs collected from OpenReview with expert-derived TLDR-PR summaries created by rewriting the first 128 words of peer review comments. Twenty-eight University of Washington undergraduate computer science students were recruited, 20 continued after initial training, and annotators were paid $20/hour; full texts were parsed with S2ORC.
  • Baselines included extractive PACSUM, BERTSUMEXT, and MatchSum, plus abstractive BART-large and BART-large finetuned on XSUM. CATTS appends control codes for TLDR and title generation, trains with an additional 20K arXiv paper-title pairs, and upsamples TLDR instances; experiments use abstract-only and abstract/introduction/conclusion (AIC) input spaces.
  • Evaluation uses max Rouge over multiple gold TLDRs per paper, plus human evaluation: nugget-based informativeness on 76 sampled gold papers and author-rated correctness from 29 unique authors covering 64 arXiv papers.

Limitations

  • Stated in the paper: experiments are limited to abstract-only and AIC input spaces, though full texts are provided for future work; the idea of a TLDR may differ across academic disciplines and is left for future work; a small fraction (<5%) of papers lacked available PDFs and were included using abstract-only text.
  • Evident from the text: the dataset is restricted to computer science papers, and the human correctness evaluation is small (29 authors, 64 papers) and found no difference between BART_XSUM and CATTS_XSUM.
  • Evident from the text: informativeness analysis uses only 76 sampled gold papers, and automated evaluation relies on max Rouge over multiple gold TLDRs, which rewards matching any gold summary and may not fully capture factual correctness.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.428

Cites

63 of 63 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

35 Own result · 15 No basis given · 9 Own method · 9 Own interpretation · 5 Partly supported · 4 Sources not found · 2 Supported · 2 No full text of the sources · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 34 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 30
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 28
47 of 47
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Scaling up data collection in a specialized scientific domain is costly and challenging.

    “Scaling up data collection in a specialized scientific domain is costly and challenging.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The typical peer reviewer has carefully scrutinized the source paper and provided a faithful summary in their comment (often in the first paragraph).

    “Assuming the typical peer reviewer has carefully scrutinized the source paper and provided a faithful summary in their comment (often in the first paragraph), domain experts can rewrite these comments into TLDRs.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Titles often contain key information about a paper.

    “As titles often contain key information about a paper, we hypothesize that training a model to generate titles will allow it to learn how to locate salient information in the paper that will be also useful for generating TLDRs.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    All papers have a title.

    “In addition, all papers have a title, and thus we have an abundant supply of paper-title pairs for training.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Human experts in computer science can reliably assess informativeness and correctness of system-generated TLDRs.

    “we also have human experts in computer science assess system-generated TLDRs under two criteria - informativeness and correctness.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Original authors of papers can reliably assess the correctness of system-generated TLDRs for their papers.

    “we ask the original authors of papers to assess the correctness of our system-generated TLDRs.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The 51 sampled papers used in human evaluation are representative of the SCITLDR test set.

    “We perform our human evaluation on BART XSUM and CATTS XSUM using the AIC input space on 51 sampled papers.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The 76 gold papers used for nugget analysis are representative.

    “we perform the nuggetbased analysis for information content over systemgenerated TLDRs for the same 76 gold papers from Section 3.2.”
8 of 8

Citations

Cites

Show all 51 references

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Paul Over. 2003. An introduction to duc 2003: Intrinsic evaluation of generic news text summarization systems. In Proceedings of Document Understanding Conference 2003 .
  2. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) , pages 32693279, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  3. Swabha Swayamdipta, Sam Thomson, Kenton Lee, Luke Zettlemoyer, Chris Dyer, and Noah A. Smith. 2018b. Syntactic scaffolds for semantic structures. In EMNLP .

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Metadata

Authors
Cachola, I., Lo, K., Cohan, A., & Weld, D.
Affiliations
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
  • University of Washington (US)
Venue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Published
2020
Pages
4766-4777
OpenAlex
W3021892802
Cited by
169
References
51
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 48 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 34 · 2020: 2
FWCI
11.35
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1936940, 2040196)
  • University of Washington
  • Office of Naval Research (N00014- 18-1-2193, N00014-18, N00014)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Text Analysis Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Text Readability and Simplification
Keywords
annotation protocol, computer science literature

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