BioCLEAR Benchmark for Biomedical Text Simplification

Abstract

Access to objective, reliable scientific information is crucial in a world of misinformation and disinformation, yet the general public often avoids scientific literature due to its perceived complexity. Modern generative information access models hold the promise of removing some of these barriers by developing appropriate approaches to scientific text simplification. We constructed BioCLEAR, a benchmark for Biomedical Comprehensible Lay Explanations of Academic Research used in the CLEF 2025 SimpleText track, comprising a large set of aligned abstracts and plain-language summaries from Cochrane systematic reviews. First, it provides a new resource for scientific document-level text simplification, including discourse-level aspects that are absent from traditional sentence-level data. Second, we include existing resources created through human sentence-level simplification to run experiments across different datasets. Third, it includes a large set of sentence-level and document-level submissions to the CLEF track, providing a sample of current models and enabling detailed analysis of their effectiveness and remaining issues.