Lessons from the TREC Plain Language Adaptation of Biomedical Abstracts (PLABA) track.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Recent advances in language models have shown potential to adapt professional-facing biomedical literature to plain language, making it accessible to patients and caregivers. However, their unpredictability and high potential for harm in this domain means rigorous evaluation is necessary. Our goals with this track were to stimulate research and to provide high-quality evaluation of the most promising systems.

Methods

We hosted the Plain Language Adaptation of Biomedical Abstracts (PLABA) track at the 2023 and 2024 Text Retrieval Conferences. Tasks included complete, sentence-level rewriting of 400 abstracts related to 40 consumer questions (Task 1) as well as identifying and replacing difficult terms in 300 abstracts spanning 30 consumer questions (Task 2). For aut

SUBMITTER: Ondov B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12912808 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature