Enhancing the understanding of clinical trials with a sentence-level simplification dataset

Resumen

We introduce a dataset with 1200 manually simplified sentences (144 019 tokens) from clinical trials in Spanish. A total of 1040 announcements from the European Clinical Trials Register (EudraCT) were analyzed to select sentences with ambiguities or exceeding 25 words. Simplification criteria were devised in an annotation guideline, which is released publicly along with the dataset. We obtained two versions: syntactically simplified sentences, and sentences with syntactic and lexical simplification. We report a quantitative, a qualitative and a human evaluation, in which three independent evaluators assessed the grammaticality/fluency, semantic adequacy and overall simplification. Results show that the resource is suitable for advancing research on automatic simplification of medical texts.