MultiMSD: A Corpus for Multilingual Medical Text Simplification from Online Medical References

Koki Horiguchi, Tomoyuki Kajiwara, Takashi Ninomiya, Shoko Wakamiya, Eiji Aramaki


Abstract
We release a parallel corpus for medical text simplification, which paraphrases medical terms into expressions easily understood by patients. Medical texts written by medical practitioners contain a lot of technical terms, and patients who are non-experts are often unable to use the information effectively. Therefore, there is a strong social demand for medical text simplification that paraphrases input sentences without using medical terms. However, this task has not been sufficiently studied in non-English languages. We therefore developed parallel corpora for medical text simplification in nine languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese, each with 10,000 sentence pairs, by automatic sentence alignment to online medical references for professionals and consumers. We also propose a method for training text simplification models to actively paraphrase complex expressions, including medical terms. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the performance of medical text simplification. In addition, we confirmed that training with a multilingual dataset is more effective than training with a monolingual dataset.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.481
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
9248–9258
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.481/
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Cite (ACL):
Koki Horiguchi, Tomoyuki Kajiwara, Takashi Ninomiya, Shoko Wakamiya, and Eiji Aramaki. 2025. MultiMSD: A Corpus for Multilingual Medical Text Simplification from Online Medical References. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 9248–9258, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MultiMSD: A Corpus for Multilingual Medical Text Simplification from Online Medical References (Horiguchi et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.481.pdf