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Sharing Copies of Synthetic Clinical Corpora without Physical Distribution — A Case Study to Get Around IPRs and Privacy Constraints Featuring the German JSYNCC Corpus

The legal culture in the European Union imposes almost unsurmountable hurdles to exploit copyright protected language data (in terms of intellectual property rights (IPRs) of media contents) and privacy protected medical health data (in terms of the notion of informational self-determination) as language resources for the NLP community. These juridical constraints have seriously hampered progress in resource-greedy NLP research, in particular for non-English languages in the clinical domain. In order to get around these restrictions, we introduce a novel approach for the creation and re-use of clinical corpora which is based on a two-step workflow. First, we substitute authentic clinical documents by synthetic ones, i.e., made-up reports and case studies written by medical professionals for educational purposes and published in medical e-textbooks. We thus eliminate patients' privacy concerns since no real, concrete individuals are addressed in such narratives. In a second step, we replace physical corpus distribution by sharing software for trustful re-construction of corpus copies. This is achieved by an end-to-end tool suite which extracts well-specified text fragments from e-books and assembles, on demand, identical copies of the same text corpus we defined at our lab at any other site where this software is executed. Thus, we avoid IPR violations since no physical corpus (raw text data) is distributed. As an illustrative case study which is easily portable to other languages we present JSYNCC, the largest and, even more importantly, first publicly available, corpus of German clinical language.