Lessons from the TREC Plain Language Adaptation of Biomedical Abstracts (PLABA) track

Objective: Recent advances in language models have shown potential to adapt professional-facing biomedical literature to plain language, making it accessible to patients and caregivers. However, their unpredictability, combined with the high potential for harm in this domain, means rigorous evaluation is necessary. Our goals with this track were to stimulate research and to provide high-quality evaluation of the most promising systems. Methods: We hosted the Plain Language Adaptation of Biomedical Abstracts (PLABA) track at the 2023 and 2024 Text Retrieval Conferences. Tasks included complete, sentence-level, rewriting of abstracts (Task 1) as well as identifying and replacing difficult terms (Task 2). For automatic evaluation of Task 1, we developed a four-fold set of professionally-written references. Submissions for both Tasks 1 and 2 were provided extensive manual evaluation from biomedical experts. Results: Twelve teams spanning twelve countries participated in the track, with models from multilayer perceptrons to large pretrained transformers. In manual judgments of Task 1, top-performing models rivaled human levels of factual accuracy and completeness, but not simplicity or brevity. Automatic, reference-based metrics generally did not correlate well with manual judgments. In Task 2, systems struggled with identifying difficult terms and classifying how to replace them. When generating replacements, however, LLM-based systems did well in manually judged accuracy, completeness, and simplicity, though not in brevity. Conclusion: The PLABA track showed promise for using Large Language Models to adapt biomedical literature for the general public, while also highlighting their deficiencies and the need for improved automatic benchmarking tools.

JEBS: A Fine-grained Biomedical Lexical Simplification Task

Online medical literature has made health information more available than ever, however, the barrier of complex medical jargon prevents the general public from understanding it. Though parallel and comparable corpora for Biomedical Text Simplification have been introduced, these conflate the many syntactic and lexical operations involved in simplification. To enable more targeted development and evaluation, we present a fine-grained lexical simplification task and dataset, Jargon Explanations for Biomedical Simplification (JEBS, https://github.com/bill-from-ri/JEBS-data ). The JEBS task involves identifying complex terms, classifying how to replace them, and generating replacement text. The JEBS dataset contains 21,595 replacements for 10,314 terms across 400 biomedical abstracts and their manually simplified versions. Additionally, we provide baseline results for a variety of rule-based and transformer-based systems for the three sub-tasks. The JEBS task, data, and baseline results pave the way for development and rigorous evaluation of systems for replacing or explaining complex biomedical terms.