PlainMedScale: A Corpus of Multi-Level Simplified Medical Texts in German and English

Abstract:We introduce PlainMedScale, a topic-aligned medical corpus spanning four levels of comprehensibility in German and English, drawn from MSD (professional and consumer), this http URL, Apotheken Umschau Einfache Sprache, and the NHS. The four tiers correspond to distinct communicative functions --- reference, explanation, decision support, and access --- and move beyond the binary expert--lay contrast of prior corpora. In two pilot studies enabled by the alignments, we show that many readability metrics established on two registers fail to generalize across the full gradient, and that a SOTA open-weight LLM prompted for Plain Language still partially preserves the difficulty of its input. Code (this https URL) and data (this https URL) are made available.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.01158 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.01158v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.01158 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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