Medical Text Simplification Using Reinforcement Learning (TESLEA): Deep Learning–Based Text Simplification Approach

Abstract

Background In most cases, the abstracts of articles in the medical domain are publicly available. Although these are accessible by everyone, they are hard to comprehend for a wider audience due to the complex medical vocabulary. Thus, simplifying these complex abstracts is essential to make medical research accessible to the general public. Objective This study aims to develop a deep learning–based text simplification (TS) approach that converts complex medical text into a simpler version while maintaining the quality of the generated text. Methods A TS approach using reinforcement learning and transformer–based language models was developed. Relevance reward, Flesch-Kincaid reward, and lexical simplicity reward were optimized to help simplify jargon-dense complex medical paragraphs to their simpler versions while retaining the quality of the text. The model was trained using 3568 complex-simple medical paragraphs and evaluated on 480 paragraphs via the help of automated metrics and human annotation. Results The proposed method outperformed previous baselines on Flesch-Kincaid scores (11.84) and achieved comparable performance with other baselines when measured using ROUGE-1 (0.39), ROUGE-2 (0.11), and SARI scores (0.40). Manual evaluation showed that percentage agreement between human annotators was more than 70% when factors such as fluency, coherence, and adequacy were considered. Conclusions A unique medical TS approach is successfully developed that leverages reinforcement learning and accurately simplifies complex medical paragraphs, thereby increasing their readability. The proposed TS approach can be applied to automatically generate simplified text for complex medical text data, which would enhance the accessibility of biomedical research to a wider audience.