PERCS: Persona-Guided Controllable Biomedical Summarization Dataset

TL;DR

PERCS is a new dataset of biomedical abstracts with summaries tailored to four distinct personas, enabling research on audience-specific biomedical text summarization and communication.

Contribution

This paper introduces PERCS, a novel dataset with persona-specific biomedical summaries, along with validation and benchmarking of large language models for controllable summarization.

Findings

Distinct readability and vocabulary across personas

Benchmark results for large language models on PERCS

Dataset and guidelines publicly available

Abstract

Automatic medical text simplification plays a key role in improving health literacy by making complex biomedical research accessible to diverse readers. However, most existing resources assume a single generic audience, overlooking the wide variation in medical literacy and information needs across user groups. To address this limitation, we introduce PERCS (Persona-guided Controllable Summarization), a dataset of biomedical abstracts paired with summaries tailored to four personas: Laypersons, Premedical Students, Non-medical Researchers, and Medical Experts. These personas represent different levels of medical literacy and information needs, emphasizing the need for targeted, audience-specific summarization. Each summary in PERCS was reviewed by physicians for factual accuracy and persona alignment using a detailed error taxonomy. Technical validation shows clear differences in readability, vocabulary, and content depth across personas. Along with describing the dataset, we benchmark four large language models on PERCS using automatic evaluation metrics that assess comprehensiveness, readability, and faithfulness, establishing baseline results for future research. The dataset, annotation guidelines, and evaluation materials are publicly available to support research on persona-specific communication and controllable biomedical summarization.