Fine-Grained Simplification of Medical Documents

Abstract

Easy access to medical and health information for children, foreigners and patients is an important issue for the modern society and research. Indeed, misunderstanding of medical and health information by patients may have a negative impact on their healthcare process and health. Even if several simplification guidelines exist, they are difficult to use by medical experts (i.e. lack of time, difficulty to respect the criteria). Existing simplification systems mainly address some lexical or syntactic transformations. We propose to combine lexical and syntactic simplifications within one rule-based system and to make the process fine-grained thanks to a better control of the grammaticality of sentences.