Developing the German Medical Text Corpus (GeMTeX): Legal Compliance and Semantic Enrichment

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)

Abstract

GeMTeX is a large-scale German Medical Text Corpus project with the goal to publish a clinical national reference corpus. The resource is currently under construction and comprises, as of February 2026, more than 15k clinical documents (20M tokens) from six German university hospitals. When building GeMTeX, attention was paid to comply with European regulatory requirements. In phase I, patients were asked to allow reuse of their clinical documents based on the legal foundation of an "informed consent". In phase II, consented documents from six major clinical sites in Germany underwent a thorough de-identification process. In phase III, we currently enrich this unlocked dataset with semantic information from the clinical domain. This annotation process is guided by Snomed CT, which supports to directly ground expressions within clinical documents in a worldwide shared medical documentation and ontology standard. The resource is currently under active development and is accessible upon request under controlled access conditions. We refer interested researchers to visit https://kiinformatik.mri.tum.de/en/gemtex or reach out via gemtex.mi@mh.tum.de.