Medical text simplification using synonym replacement: Adapting assessment of word difficulty to a compounding language
Emil Abrahamsson, Timothy Forni, Maria Skeppstedt, Maria Kvist · 2014
Medical texts can be difficult to understand for laymen, due to a frequent occurrence of specialised medical terms.Replacing these difficult terms with easier synonyms can, however, lead to improved readability.In this study, we have adapted a method for assessing difficulty of words to make it more suitable to medical Swedish.The difficulty of a word was assessed not only by measuring the frequency of the word in a general corpus, but also by measuring the frequency of substrings of words, thereby adapting the method to the compounding nature of Swedish.All words having a MeSH synonym that was assessed as easier, were replaced in a corpus of medical text.According to the readability measure LIX, the replacement resulted in a slightly more difficult text, while the readability increased according to the OVIX measure and to a preliminary reader study.