Demo · Iterated compression

The Compression Waterfall.

One patient letter, four summarisation passes. Drag the slider and watch it come apart, then read what is left and decide whether you would know anything was missing.

Original Pass 1 Pass 2 Pass 3 Pass 4
Discharge advice · chest infection96 words

Meaning mass

100%
How much of the actionable content is still in the letter.

The document as written

What each pass removes

Why four passes and not one

Almost every study of summarisation loss measures a single compression: one encounter, one summary, one comparison. Real records are not compressed once. A ward note is summarised into a discharge letter, the letter is summarised for the patient, the patient version is summarised again for a family member on the phone, and each step is locally reasonable.

Loss compounds in a specific order. Qualifiers and hedges go first, so nothing sounds uncertain. Then quantities and timeframes, so nothing can be checked. Then warning detail, so the safety netting loses its net. Last are destinations and urgency: where to go, how fast.

Four passes is not a model run. It is an authored demonstration of that order, which is what the research is trying to establish: that compression has a predictable signature, and that the signature is invisible in the output because every pass produces something fluent.

The letter, the word weights and the four passes were written for this demonstration. No real clinical record is shown and no model is run at runtime. This is a research demo about the order in which detail disappears, not clinical advice.