Enhancing readability and comprehension of medical reports: a comparison between two online text simplification tools

Abstract

Medical reports are a fundamental text type in the life of patients, but also one of the most difficult ones to understand by non-specialists. For this reason, software tools specifically devoted to the simplification of medical texts, including reports, have been developed.
In this paper, we analysed the performance of two different text simplification tools in a sample of fifty medical reports in English. Both tools support lexical simplification, while one of the tools also provides suggestions for syntactic simplification. We compared the two tools by calculating the readability index of each medical report before and after being processed by the tools. To this aim, we used two different readability formulas.
Both tools succeeded in producing some degree of simplification; however, their performance strongly varied depending on the text and the readability formula considered.