Building a comparable corpus and a benchmark for Spanish medical text simplification

Resumen

We report the collection of the CLARA-MeD comparable corpus, which is made up of 24 298 pairs of professional and simplified texts in the medical domain for the Spanish language (>96M tokens). Texts types range from drug leaets and summaries of product characteristics (10 211 pairs of texts, >82M words), abstracts of systematic reviews (8138 pairs of texts, >9M words), cancer-related information summaries (201 pairs of texts, >3M tokens) and clinical trials announcements (5748 pairs of texts, 451 690 words). We also report the alignment of professional and simplified sentences, conducted manually by pairs of annotators. A subset of 3800 sentence pairs (149 862 tokens) has been aligned each by 2 experts, with an average inter-annotator agreement kappa score of 0.839 (+- 0.076). The data are available in the community and contributes with a new benchmark to develop and evaluate automatic medical text simplification systems.