Patient-friendly Clinical Notes: Towards a new Text Simplification Dataset

Abstract

Automatic text simplification can help patients to better understand their own clinical notes. A major hurdle for the development of clinical text simplification methods is the lack of high quality resources. We report ongoing efforts in creating a parallel dataset of professionally simplified clinical notes. Currently, this corpus consists of 851 document-level simplifications of German pathology reports. We highlight characteristics of this dataset and establish first baselines for paragraph-level simplification.