CLEF 2023 SimpleText Track - What Happens if General Users Search Scientific Texts?

The general public tends to avoid reliable sources such as scientific literature due to their complex language and lacking background knowledge. Instead, they rely on shallow and derived sources on the web and in social media – often published for commercial or political incentives, rather than the informational value. Can text simplification help to remove some of these access barriers? This paper presents the CLEF 2023 SimpleText track tackling technical and evaluation challenges of scientific information access for a general audience. We provide appropriate reusable data and benchmarks for scientific text simplification, and promote novel research to reduce barriers in understanding complex texts. Our overall use-case is to create a simplified summary of multiple scientific documents based on a popular science query which provides a user with an accessible overview on this specific topic. The track has the following three concrete tasks. Task 1 (What is in, or out?): Selecting passages to include in a simplified summary. Task 2 (What is unclear?): Difficult concept identification and explanation. Task 3 (Rewrite this!): Text simplification - rewriting scientific text. The three tasks together form a pipeline of a scientific text simplification system.