Med-EASi: Finely Annotated Dataset and Models for Controllable Simplification of Medical Texts
This work addresses the need for better patient communication and health literacy by providing a resource for medical text simplification, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with new annotations.
The authors tackled the problem of automatic medical text simplification by creating Med-EASi, a finely annotated dataset with expert-layman-AI collaborative annotations, and developed controllable models that improved simplification quality, with position-aware control outperforming position-agnostic approaches.
Automatic medical text simplification can assist providers with patient-friendly communication and make medical texts more accessible, thereby improving health literacy. But curating a quality corpus for this task requires the supervision of medical experts. In this work, we present $\textbf{Med-EASi}$ ($\underline{\textbf{Med}}$ical dataset for $\underline{\textbf{E}}$laborative and $\underline{\textbf{A}}$bstractive $\underline{\textbf{Si}}$mplification), a uniquely crowdsourced and finely annotated dataset for supervised simplification of short medical texts. Its $\textit{expert-layman-AI collaborative}$ annotations facilitate $\textit{controllability}$ over text simplification by marking four kinds of textual transformations: elaboration, replacement, deletion, and insertion. To learn medical text simplification, we fine-tune T5-large with four different styles of input-output combinations, leading to two control-free and two controllable versions of the model. We add two types of $\textit{controllability}$ into text simplification, by using a multi-angle training approach: $\textit{position-aware}$, which uses in-place annotated inputs and outputs, and $\textit{position-agnostic}$, where the model only knows the contents to be edited, but not their positions. Our results show that our fine-grained annotations improve learning compared to the unannotated baseline. Furthermore, $\textit{position-aware}$ control generates better simplification than the $\textit{position-agnostic}$ one. The data and code are available at https://github.com/Chandrayee/CTRL-SIMP.