Can summarization approximate simplification? A gold standard comparison

Abstract

This study explores the overlap between text summarization and simplification outputs. While summarization evaluation methods are streamlined, simplification lacks cohesion, prompting the question: how closely can abstractive summarization resemble gold-standard simplification? We address this by applying two BART-based BRIO summarization methods to the Newsela corpus, comparing outputs with manually annotated simplifications and achieving a top ROUGE-L score of 0.654. This provides insight into where summarization and simplification outputs converge and differ.