Paraphrase acquisition from comparable medical corpora of specialized and lay texts

Nowadays a large amount of health information is available to the public, but medical language is often difficult for lay people to understand. Developing means to make medical information more comprehensible is therefore a real need. In this regard, a useful resource would be a corpus of specialized and lay paraphrases. To this end we built comparable corpora of specialized and lay texts on which we applied paraphrasing patterns based on anchors of deverbal noun and verb pairs. The results show that the paraphrases were of good quality (71.4% to 94.2% precision) and that this type of paraphrases was relevant in the context of studying the differences between specialized and lay language. This study also demonstrates that simple paraphrase acquisition methods can also work on texts with a rather small degree of similarity, once similar text segments are detected.