A Lexical Simplification Tool for Promoting Health Literacy

Leonardo Zilio, Liana Braga Paraguassu, Luis Antonio Leiva Hercules, Gabriel Ponomarenko, Laura Berwanger, Maria José Bocorny Finatto


Abstract
This paper presents MedSimples, an authoring tool that combines Natural Language Processing, Corpus Linguistics and Terminology to help writers to convert health-related information into a more accessible version for people with low literacy skills. MedSimples applies parsing methods associated with lexical resources to automatically evaluate a text and present simplification suggestions that are more suitable for the target audience. Using the suggestions provided by the tool, the author can adapt the original text and make it more accessible. The focus of MedSimples lies on texts for special purposes, so that it not only deals with general vocabulary, but also with specialized terms. The tool is currently under development, but an online working prototype exists and can be tested freely. An assessment of MedSimples was carried out aiming at evaluating its current performance with some promising results, especially for informing the future developments that are planned for the tool.
Anthology ID:
2020.readi-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI)
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Núria Gala, Rodrigo Wilkens
Venue:
READI
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
70–76
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.readi-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leonardo Zilio, Liana Braga Paraguassu, Luis Antonio Leiva Hercules, Gabriel Ponomarenko, Laura Berwanger, and Maria José Bocorny Finatto. 2020. A Lexical Simplification Tool for Promoting Health Literacy. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI), pages 70–76, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Lexical Simplification Tool for Promoting Health Literacy (Zilio et al., READI 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.readi-1.11.pdf