PlainMedScale: A Corpus of Multi-Level Simplified Medical Texts in German and English
Bruno Brocai, Ilaria Papagno, Mayumi Ohta
cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-08-02
Comments: accepted at KONVENS 2026
Code: https://github.com/GS-Uni-Heidelberg/PlainMedScale
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The gist: We introduce PlainMedScale, a topic-aligned medical corpus spanning four levels of comprehensibility in German and English, drawn from MSD (professional and consumer), Gesund.Bund, Apotheken Umschau
Terminology
Abstract
We introduce PlainMedScale, a topic-aligned medical corpus spanning four levels of comprehensibility in German and English, drawn from MSD (professional and consumer), Gesund.Bund, 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 (https://github.com/GS-Uni-Heidelberg/PlainMedScale) and data (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21728290) are made available.
Sources
- Med-EASi: Finely Annotated Dataset and Models for Controllable Simplification of Medical Texts
- Qwen3 Technical Report
- JEBS: A Fine-grained Biomedical Lexical Simplification Task
- Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models
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