Simplifying Drug Package Leaflets

Drug Package Leaflets provide information for patients on how to safely use medicines. European Commission and recent studies stress that further efforts must be made to improve the readability and understandability of package leaflets in order to ensure the proper use of medicines and to increase patient safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that directly deals with the automatic simplification of drug package leaflets. Our approach to lexical simplification combines the use of domain terminological resources to give a set of synonym candidates for a given target term, and the use of their frequencies in a large collection of documents in order to select the simplest synonym.