The most reliable and up-to-date information on health questions is in the biomedical literature, but inaccessible due to the complex language full of jargon. Domain specific scientific text simplification holds the promise to make this literature accessible to a lay audience. Therefore, we create Cochrane-auto: a large corpus of pairs of aligned sentences, paragraphs, and abstracts from biomedical abstracts and lay summaries. Experiments demonstrate that a plan-guided simplification system trained on Cochrane-auto is able to outperform a strong baseline trained on unaligned abstracts and lay summaries. More generally, our freely available corpus complementing Newsela-auto and Wiki-auto facilitates text simplification research beyond the sentence-level and direct lexical and grammatical revisions.

Previous research on automatic text simplification has focused on almost exclusively on sentence-level inputs. However, the simplification of full documents cannot be tackled by naively simplifying each sentence in isolation, as this approach fails to preserve the discourse structure of the document. Recent Context-Aware Document Simplification approaches explore various models whose input goes beyond the sentence-level. These model achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Newsela-auto dataset, which requires a difficult to obtain license to use. We replicate these experiments on an open-source dataset, namely Wiki-auto, and share all training details to make future reproductions easy. Our results validate the claim that models guided by a document-level plan outperform their standard counterparts. However, they do not support the claim that simplification models perform better when they have access to a local document context. We also find that planning models do not generalize well to out-of-domain settings. Lay Summary: We have access to unprecedented amounts of information, yet the most authoritative sources may exceed a user’s language proficiency level. Text simplification technology can change the writing style while preserving the main content. Recent paragraph-level and document-level text simplification approaches outcompete traditional sentence-level approaches, and increase the understandability of complex texts.