# PlainMedScale: A Corpus of Multi-Level Simplified Medical Texts in German and English

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01158/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Paragraph-level Simplification of Medical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05767/) (2021)
- [Keep it Simple: Unsupervised Simplification of Multi-Paragraph Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03444/) (2021)
- [A Corpus for Automatic Readability Assessment and Text Simplification of German](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09067/) (2019)
- [Med-EASi: Finely Annotated Dataset and Models for Controllable Simplification of Medical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09155/) (2023)
- [DEPLAIN: A German Parallel Corpus with Intralingual Translations into Plain Language for Sentence and Document Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18939/) (2023)
- [A New Aligned Simple German Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01106/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.