ACCoRD: A Multi-Document Approach to Generating Diverse Descriptions of Scientific Concepts

Sonia K. Murthy, Kyle Lo, Daniel King, Chandra Bhagavatula, Bailey Kuehl, Sophie Johnson, Jonathan Borchardt, Daniel S. Weld, Tom Hope, Doug Downey

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Systems that automatically define unfamiliar terms hold the promise of improving the accessibility of scientific texts, especially for readers who may lack prerequisite background knowledge. However, current systems assume a single “best” description per concept, which fails to account for the many ways a concept can be described. We present ACCoRD, an end-to-end system tackling the novel task of generating sets of descriptions of scientific concepts. Our system takes advantage of the myriad ways a concept is mentioned across the scientific literature to produce distinct, diverse descriptions of target concepts in terms of different reference concepts. In a user study, we find that users prefer (1) descriptions produced by our end-to-end system, and (2) multiple descriptions to a single “best” description. We release the ACCoRD corpus which includes 1,275 labeled contexts and 1,787 expert-authored concept descriptions to support research on our task.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2022 - 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Demonstrations Session
EditorsWanxiang Che, Ekaterina Shutova
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages200-213
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429418
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022 - Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Duration: 7 Dec 202211 Dec 2022

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2022 - 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Demonstrations Session

Conference

Conference2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Arab Emirates
CityAbu Dhabi
Period7/12/2211/12/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

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