Overview of the CLEF 2025 SimpleText Task 1 Simplify Scientific Text

This paper presents an overview of the CLEF 2025 SimpleText Task 1 on Text Simplification. The task aims to simplify scientific text. We discuss the data and benchmarks provided for these tasks, along with preliminary insights and anticipated challenges. Our main findings are the following. First, we advanced the field of text simplification by creating new biomedical corpora that support true paragraph- and document-level simplification, capturing greater variation and complex discourse suited to LLMs. Second, our CLEF 2025 document-level corpus showed for the first time that document-level simplification models clearly outperformed sentence-level methods. Third, in addressing the biomedical domain, teams developed novel approaches to generate plain language summaries that overcome key barriers for consumers, enhancing accessibility to authoritative health information. More generally, we hope and expect that the constructed corpora and evaluation data will be used by researchers to further advance text simplification approaches, both in general and specifically for the biomedical domain.