Medical text simplification using synonym replacement: Adapting assessment of word difficulty to a compounding language

Abstract

Medical texts can be difficult to understand for laymen, due to a frequent occurrence of specialised medical terms. Replacing these difficult terms with easier synonyms can, however, lead to improved readability. In this study, we have adapted a method for assessing difficulty of words to make it more suitable to medical Swedish. The difficulty of a word was assessed not only by measuring the frequency of the word in a general corpus, but also by measuring the frequency of substrings of words, thereby adapting the method to the compounding nature of Swedish. All words having a MeSH synonym that was assessed as easier, were replaced in a corpus of medical text. According to the readability measure LIX, the replacement resulted in a slightly more difficult text, while the readability increased according to the OVIX measure and to a preliminary reader study.