Mathias MJ Bellaiche
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LLM-based Lossless Text Simplification and its Effect on User Comprehension and Cognitive Load
Theo Guidroz
Diego Ardila
Jimmy Li
Adam Mansour
Paul Jhun
Nina Gonzalez
Xiang Ji
Mike Sanchez
Miguel Ángel Garrido
Divyansh Choudhary
Jay Hartford
Georgina Xu
Henry Serrano
Yifan Wang
Jeff Shaffer
Eric (Yifan) Cao
Sho Fujiwara
Peggy Bui
arXiv (2025)
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Information on the web, such as scientific publications and Wikipedia, often surpasses users' reading level. To help address this, we used a self-refinement approach to develop a LLM capability for minimally lossy text simplification. To validate our approach, we conducted a randomized study involving 4563 participants and 31 texts spanning 6 broad subject areas: PubMed (biomedical scientific articles), biology, law, finance, literature/philosophy, and aerospace/computer science. Participants were randomized to viewing original or simplified texts in a subject area, and answered multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that tested their comprehension of the text. The participants were also asked to provide qualitative feedback such as task difficulty. Our results indicate that participants who read the simplified text answered more MCQs correctly than their counterparts who read the original text (3.9% absolute increase, p<0.05). This gain was most striking with PubMed (14.6%), while more moderate gains were observed for finance (5.5%), aerospace/computer science (3.8%) domains, and legal (3.5%). Notably, the results were robust to whether participants could refer back to the text while answering MCQs. The absolute accuracy decreased by up to ~9% for both original and simplified setups where participants could not refer back to the text, but the ~4% overall improvement persisted. Finally, participants' self-reported perceived ease based on a simplified NASA Task Load Index was greater for those who read the simplified text (absolute change on a 5-point scale 0.33, p<0.05). This randomized study, involving an order of magnitude more participants than prior works, demonstrates the potential of LLMs to make complex information easier to understand. Our work aims to enable a broader audience to better learn and make use of expert knowledge available on the web, improving information accessibility.
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Automated LOINC Standardization Using Pre-trained Large Language Models
Eric Loreaux
Emma Chesley
Paul Gamble
Martin Seneviratne
Ming-Jun Chen
PMLR (2022), pp. 343-355
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Harmonization of local source concepts to standard clinical terminologies is a prerequisite for multi-center data aggregation and sharing. Challenges in automating the mapping process stem from the idiosyncratic source encoding schemes adopted by different health systems and the lack of large publicly available training data. In this study, we aim to develop a scalable and generalizable machine learning tool to facilitate standardizing laboratory observations to the Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC). Specifically, we leverage the contextual embedding from pre-trained T5 models and propose a two-stage fine-tuning strategy based on contrastive learning to enable learning in a few-shot setting without manual feature engineering. Our method utilizes unlabeled general LOINC ontology and data augmentation to achieve impressive performance on retrieving the most relevant LOINC targets when limited amount of labeled data are available. We further show that our model generalizes well to unseen targets. Taken together, our approach shows great potential to reduce manual effort in LOINC standardization and can be easily extended to mapping other terminologies.
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