{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/generating-scientific-definitions-with-1","title":"Generating Scientific Definitions with Controllable Complexity","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2022-05-01","proceeding":"ACL 2022 5","authors":["Tal August","Katharina Reinecke","Noah Smith"],"abstract":"Unfamiliar terminology and complex language can present barriers to understanding science. Natural language processing stands to help address these issues by automatically defining unfamiliar terms. We introduce a new task and dataset for defining scientific terms and controlling the complexity of generated definitions as a way of adapting to a specific reader’s background knowledge. We test four definition generation methods for this new task, finding that a sequence-to-sequence approach is most successful. We then explore the version of the task in which definitions are generated at a target complexity level. We introduce a novel reranking approach and find in human evaluations that it offers superior fluency while also controlling complexity, compared to several controllable generation baselines.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.569","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.569.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"generating-scientific-definitions-with-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/talaugust/definition-complexity","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reranking","task_name":"Reranking"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}