French Biomedical Text Simplification: When Small and Precise Helps

AbstractWe present experiments on biomedical text simplification in French. We use two kinds of corpora – parallel sentences extracted from existing health comparable corpora in French and WikiLarge corpus translated from English to French – and a lexicon that associates medical terms with paraphrases. Then, we train neural models on these parallel corpora using different ratios of general and specialized sentences. We evaluate the results with BLEU, SARI and Kandel scores. The results point out that little specialized data helps significantly the simplification.