CRII: CHS: Facilitating Consumption and Re-expression of Scientific Information in a Journalism Context

这项研究将产生软件工具，帮助记者，科学家和新闻读者以更容易理解的方式撰写和阅读科学发现。虽然非科学受众能够理解技术，生物，遗传和其他科学领域的新进展很重要，但由于使用行话，许多科学文章很难理解。使科学发现更容易理解的一种方法是用更简单的术语来重新表达它们，例如使用术语“蝴蝶”而不是“鳞翅目昆虫”。“通过编写软件来分析科学出版物和新闻文章的集合，我们将发现更容易理解的科学术语表达，并开发用户界面工具，允许作者或读者在撰写或阅读有关科学的文章时访问这些术语。除了通过新闻支持科学传播外，我们希望我们的工具能够帮助科学家创建和分享更广泛理解的工作摘要。这项工作将有助于新的基于软件的技术，促进科学术语的词汇简化，这借鉴并有助于自然语言处理和人机交互领域。该项目的技术目标是研究如何通过以下方式在工具中有效地重新表达科学术语：1）识别人类作者（如科学记者）用来重新表达复杂科学内容的策略，以及2）开发用户界面和算法，当作者（如记者）为普通读者撰写科学文章时，或者提供给缺乏领域专业知识的读者。为了构建将在我们的交互式工具中使用的简化算法，我们将首先从语料库中学习科学术语和简单术语之间的映射，这些语料库包括科学写作，如PLOS或PubMed中的期刊出版物以及科学家或新闻记者撰写的这些信息的简单摘要。我们将应用词嵌入和其他词的联想方法，这样的语料库，以确定不同的方法学习简化的有效性。我们将在混合主动创作和阅读界面中应用这些简化，这些界面通过以各种方式推荐和启用简化的简单应用来增强人类作者或读者的能力。

This research will result in software tools that help journalists, scientists, and news readers write and read about scientific findings in more understandable ways. Though it is important that non-scientific audiences are able understand new advances in technological, biological, genetic, and other scientific fields, much of science writing is difficult to understand due to the use of jargon. One way to make scientific findings easier to understand is to re-express them using simpler terms, such as using the term "butterfly" instead of "lepidtoperan." By writing software to analyze collections of scientific publications and news articles, we will discover more understandable expressions for scientific terms, and develop user interface tools that allow an author or a reader to access these terms while they write or read about science. In addition to supporting science communication through the news, we expect our tools will help scientists create and share more broadly understandable summaries of their work.This work will contribute new software-based techniques to facilitate lexical simplification of scientific terminology, which draws upon and contributes to the fields of natural language processing and human-computer interaction. The technical objective of this project is to investigate how to enable effective re-expressions of scientific terms in tools through: 1) identifying strategies that human authors like science journalists use to re-express complex scientific content, and 2) developing user interfaces and algorithms that present simplifications to an author like a journalist as she writes about science for a general audience, or to a reader who lacks domain expertise. To build the simplification algorithms that will be used in our interactive tools, we will first learn mappings between scientific and simpler terms from corpora that include scientific writing such as journal publications in PLOS or PubMed as well as simpler summaries of this information written by the scientists or written by news journalists. We will apply word embeddings and other word association methods to such corpora to determine the effectiveness of different methods for learning simplifications. We will apply these simplifications in mixed initiative authoring and reading interfaces that enhance the capabilities of a human author or reader by recommending and enabling easy application of simplifications in various ways.