When text simplification is not enough: Could a graph-based visualization facilitate consumers’ comprehension of dietary supplement information?

Background: Dietary supplements are widely used. However, dietary supplements are not always safe. For example, an estimated 23,000 emergency room visits every year in the United States were attributed to adverse events related to dietary supplement use. With the rapid development of the Internet, consumers usually seek health information including dietary supplement information online. To help consumers access quality online dietary supplement information, we have identified trustworthy dietary supplement information sources and built an evidence-based knowledge base of dietary supplement information—the integrated DIetary Supplement Knowledge base (iDISK) that integrates and standardizes dietary supplement related information across these different sources. However, as information in iDISK was collected from scientific sources, the complex medical jargon is a barrier for consumers’ comprehension. Objective: To assess how different approaches to simplify and represent dietary supplement information from iDISK will affect lay consumers’ comprehension.

Methods: Using a crowdsourcing platform, we recruited participants to read dietary supplement information in four different representations from iDISK: (1) original text, (2) syntactic and lexical text simplification, (3) manual text simplification, and (4) a graph-based visualization. We then assessed how the different simplification and representation strategies affected consumers’ comprehension of dietary supplement information in terms of accuracy and response time to a set of comprehension questions.

Results: With responses from 690 qualified participants, our experiments confirmed that the manual approach, as expected, had the best performance for both accuracy and response time to the comprehension questions, while the graph-based approach ranked the second outperforming other representations. In some cases, the graph-based representation outperformed the manual approach in terms of response time.

Conclusions: A hybrid approach that combines text and graph-based representations might be needed to accommodate consumers’ different information needs and information seeking behavior.

研究背景：膳食补充剂（dietary supplements）应用广泛，但并非始终安全。据估算，美国每年约有2.3万次急诊就诊与膳食补充剂使用相关的不良事件有关。随着互联网的快速发展，消费者通常会在线获取包括膳食补充剂信息在内的健康资讯。为帮助消费者获取优质的在线膳食补充剂信息，我们筛选出了可信的膳食补充剂信息来源，并构建了循证的膳食补充剂知识库——整合膳食补充剂知识库（integrated DIetary Supplement Knowledge base, iDISK），该库整合并标准化了来自不同来源的膳食补充剂相关信息。然而，由于iDISK中的信息源自科学文献，复杂的医学术语会阻碍普通消费者的理解。
研究目标：评估不同的简化与呈现方式对iDISK中膳食补充剂信息的处理效果，及其对普通消费者理解程度的影响。
研究方法：我们通过众包平台招募参与者，让其阅读来自iDISK的四种不同呈现形式的膳食补充剂信息：(1) 原始文本；(2) 句法与词汇层面的文本简化；(3) 人工文本简化；(4) 基于图的可视化呈现。随后，我们通过一系列理解测试题的作答准确率与反应时间，评估不同简化与呈现策略对消费者理解膳食补充剂信息效果的影响。
研究结果：本次实验共回收690份有效参与者答卷，结果证实，如预期所言，人工简化方式在理解测试的准确率与反应时间两项指标上均表现最优；基于图的可视化呈现方式位列第二，优于其余两种呈现形式。在部分场景中，基于图的呈现方式在反应时间指标上甚至优于人工简化方式。
研究结论：为适配消费者不同的信息需求与信息获取行为，或许需要结合文本与基于图的呈现方式的混合策略。