  When seeking information not covered in patient-friendly documents, like
medical pamphlets, healthcare consumers may turn to the research literature.
Reading medical papers, however, can be a challenging experience. To improve
access to medical papers, we introduce a novel interactive interface-Paper
Plain-with four features powered by natural language processing: definitions of
unfamiliar terms, in-situ plain language section summaries, a collection of key
questions that guide readers to answering passages, and plain language
summaries of the answering passages. We evaluate Paper Plain, finding that
participants who use Paper Plain have an easier time reading and understanding
research papers without a loss in paper comprehension compared to those who use
a typical PDF reader. Altogether, the study results suggest that guiding
readers to relevant passages and providing plain language summaries, or
"gists," alongside the original paper content can make reading medical papers
easier and give readers more confidence to approach these papers.
