Designing and Executing a Large-Scale User Study on Scientific Text Simplification

Objective

This topic is about making scientific texts more understandable. The goal is to automatically rewrite academic articles so they become clear not only to field experts but also to researchers from other disciplines and interested laypeople. It’s a unique chance to actively engage in a project that could transform how we interact with scientific knowledge.

What are the tasks?

• Implement and evaluate generative AI models (e.g., GPT-based) which can summarize and/or simplify scientific texts automatically.

Further Reading

• https://simplifymytext.org
• Michael Färber, Parisa Aghdam, Kyuri Im, Mario Tawfelis, Hardik Ghoshal: “SimplifyMyText: An LLM-Based System for Inclusive Plain Language Text Simplification”, Proceedings of the 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’25), Lucca, Italy, 2025.

What prerequisites do you need?

• A passion for making scientific knowledge accessible to a broader audience.
• Strong interest in research, user study design, and data analysis.
• Good organizational skills to effectively design and manage a large user study (funded by the chair).
• Basic programming skills.

Contact Person

• Tim Schopf, tim.schopf@tu-dresden.de