Data Augmentation for Radiology Report Simplification

Ziyu Yang, Santhosh Cherian, Slobodan Vucetic

Abstract: This work considers the development of a text simplification model to help patients better understand their radiology reports. This paper proposes a data augmentation approach to address the data scarcity issue caused by the high cost of manual simplification. It prompts a large foundational pre-trained language model to generate simplifications of unlabeled radiology sentences. In addition, it uses paraphrasing of labeled radiology sentences. Experimental results show that the proposed data augmentation approach enables the training of a significantly more accurate simplification model than the baselines.