What’s in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization
Griffin Adams, Emily Alsentzer, Mert Ketenci, Jason Zucker, Noémie Elhadad
Abstract
Summarization of clinical narratives is a long-standing research problem. Here, we introduce the task of hospital-course summarization. Given the documentation authored throughout a patient’s hospitalization, generate a paragraph that tells the story of the patient admission. We construct an English, text-to-text dataset of 109,000 hospitalizations (2M source notes) and their corresponding summary proxy: the clinician-authored “Brief Hospital Course” paragraph written as part of a discharge note. Exploratory analyses reveal that the BHC paragraphs are highly abstractive with some long extracted fragments; are concise yet comprehensive; differ in style and content organization from the source notes; exhibit minimal lexical cohesion; and represent silver-standard references. Our analysis identifies multiple implications for modeling this complex, multi-document summarization task.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.naacl-main.382
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4794–4811
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.382
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.382
- Cite (ACL):
- Griffin Adams, Emily Alsentzer, Mert Ketenci, Jason Zucker, and Noémie Elhadad. 2021. What’s in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4794–4811, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- What’s in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization (Adams et al., NAACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2021.naacl-main.382.pdf
- Data
- CNN/Daily Mail