Papers › AutoMeTS: The Autocomplete for Medical Text Simplification

AutoMeTS: The Autocomplete for Medical Text Simplification

20 Oct 2020COLING 2020 8arXiv:2010.10573archive 2025-07-28

Hoang Van, David Kauchak, Gondy Leroy

The goal of text simplification (TS) is to transform difficult text into a version that is easier to understand and more broadly accessible to a wide variety of readers. In some domains, such as healthcare, fully automated approaches cannot be used since information must be accurately preserved. Instead, semi-automated approaches can be used that assist a human writer in simplifying text faster and at a higher quality. In this paper, we examine the application of autocomplete to text simplification in the medical domain. We introduce a new parallel medical data set consisting of aligned English Wikipedia with Simple English Wikipedia sentences and examine the application of pretrained neural language models (PNLMs) on this dataset. We compare four PNLMs(BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and GPT-2), and show how the additional context of the sentence to be simplified can be incorporated to achieve better results (6.17% absolute improvement over the best individual model). We also introduce an ensemble model that combines the four PNLMs and outperforms the best individual model by 2.1%, resulting in an overall word prediction accuracy of 64.52%.

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Code

vanh17/MedTextSimplifier officialmentioned in paper report

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Tasks

SentenceText Simplification

Datasets

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Medical Wiki Paralell Corpus for Medical Text Simplification

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionRoBERTaSentencePieceSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPieceXLNet

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