ArticleInternational journal of medical informatics2013
A user-study measuring the effects of lexical simplification and coherence enhancement on perceived and actual text difficulty.
Article in International journal of medical informatics, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Challenges and Opportunities for Professional Medical Publications Writers to Contribute to Plain Language Summaries (PLS) in an AI/ML Environment - A Consumer Health Informatics Systematic Review.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2023Pooled it
- Rethinking Pediatric Asthma Education Through Large Language Model Generation and Simplification: Randomized Double-Blind Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Trial
- Evaluating the efficacy of NoteAid on EHR note comprehension among US Veterans through Amazon Mechanical Turk.International journal of medical informatics · 2023Trial
- ChatGPT improves readability in validated spine patient-reported outcome measures.North American Spine Society journal · 2026Article
- A survey of automated methods for biomedical text simplification.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2022Article
- Article
- Measuring Text Difficulty Using Parse-Tree Frequency.Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2017Article
- NegAIT: A new parser for medical text simplification using morphological, sentential and double negation.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2017Article
- The Role of Surface, Semantic and Grammatical Features on Simplification of Spanish Medical Texts: A User Study.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2017Article
- An exploratory study of inactive health information seekers.International journal of medical informatics · 2015Article
- The effect of word familiarity on actual and perceived text difficulty.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2014Article
- Does query expansion limit our learning? A comparison of social-based expansion to content-based expansion for medical queries on the internet.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2014Article
- User evaluation of the effects of a text simplification algorithm using term familiarity on perception, understanding, learning, and information retention.Journal of medical Internet research · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeLow patient health literacy has been associated with cost increases in medicine because it contributes to inadequate care. Providing explanatory text is a convenient approach to distribute medical information and increase health literacy. Unfortunately, writing text that is easily understood is challenging. This work tests two text features for their impact on understanding: lexical simplification and coherence enhancement.
methodsA user study was conducted to test the features' effect on perceived and actual text difficulty. Individual sentences were used to test perceived difficulty. Using a 5-point Likert scale, participants compared eight pairs of original and simplified sentences. Abstracts were used to test actual difficulty. For each abstract, four versions were created: original, lexically simplified, coherence enhanced, and lexically simplified and coherence enhanced. Using a mixed design, one group of participants worked with the original and lexically simplified documents (no coherence enhancement) while a second group worked with the coherence enhanced versions. Actual difficulty was measured using a Cloze measure and multiple-choice questions.
resultsUsing Amazon's Mechanical Turk, 200 people participated of which 187 qualified based on our data qualification tests. A paired-samples t-test for the sentence ratings showed a significant reduction in difficulty after lexical simplification (p<.001). Results for actual difficulty are based on the abstracts and associated tasks. A two-way ANOVA for the Cloze test showed no effect of coherence enhancement but a main effect for lexical simplification, with the simplification leading to worse scores (p=.004). A follow-up ANOVA showed this effect exists only for function words when coherence was not enhanced (p=.008). In contrast, a two-way ANOVA for answering multiple-choice questions showed a significant beneficial effect of coherence enhancement (p=.003) but no effect of lexical simplification.
conclusionsLexical simplification reduced the perceived difficulty of texts. Coherence enhancement reduced the actual difficulty of text when measured using multiple-choice questions. However, the Cloze measure results showed that lexical simplification can negatively impact the flow of the text.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.