Insights from CL-SciSumm 2016: the faceted scientific document summarization Shared Task

Abstract

We describe the participation and the official results of the 2nd Computational Linguistics Scientific Summarization Shared Task (CL-SciSumm), held as a part of the BIRNDL workshop at the Joint Conference for Digital Libraries 2016 in Newark, New Jersey. CL-SciSumm is the first medium-scale Shared Task on scientific document summarization in the computational linguistics (CL) domain. Participants were provided a training corpus of 30 topics, each comprising of a reference paper (RP) and 10 or more citing papers, all of which cite the RP. For each citation, the text spans (i.e., citances) that pertain to the RP have been identified. Participants solved three sub-tasks in automatic research paper summarization using this text corpus. Fifteen teams from six countries registered for the Shared Task, of which ten teams ultimately submitted and presented their results. The annotated corpus comprised 30 target papers—currently the largest available corpora of its kind. The corpus is available for free download and use at https://github.com/WING-NUS/scisumm-corpus.