A Human-in-the-Loop Corpus for LLM-Based Simplification of Scientific Summaries

Abstract:Interdisciplinary research is accelerating, yet scientific papers remain difficult to understand outside their home fields. We study large language model (LLM)-based simplification of scientific texts and present a human-in-the-loop workflow that transforms expert summaries into more accessible versions for non-specialists. Using SciSummNet as the source corpus, we first generate baseline simplifications with GPT-4o-mini. In Phase 1, readers from STEM fields outside computer science identify difficult sentences and phrases and compare the original and GPT-simplified summaries in terms of comprehensibility, naturalness, and simplicity. In Phase 2, computer science experts use this feedback to create expert-edited reference simplifications. We release the resulting corpus together with human judgments and automatic evaluation results. The Phase 1 judgments show a clear preference for the GPT-generated summaries in terms of comprehensibility and simplicity, while qualitative analysis of the Phase 2 edits highlights the importance of preserving domain-specific terminology and the strength of scientific claims. The resulting resource supports the training and benchmarking of simplification systems for cross-disciplinary scientific communication.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

arXiv:2607.25630 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.25630v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.25630 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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