GRASUM at BioLaySumm Task 1: Background Knowledge Grounding for Readable, Relevant, and Factual Biomedical Lay Summaries

Domenic Rosati

Abstract
Communication of scientific findings to the public is important for keeping non-experts informed of developments such as life-saving medical treatments. However, generating readable lay summaries from scientific documents is challenging, and currently, these summaries suffer from critical factual errors. One popular intervention for improving factuality is using additional external knowledge to provide factual grounding. However, it is unclear how these grounding sources should be retrieved, selected, or integrated, and how supplementary grounding documents might affect the readability or relevance of the generated summaries. We develop a simple method for selecting grounding sources and integrating them with source documents. We then use the BioLaySum summarization dataset to evaluate the effects of different grounding sources on summary quality. We found that grounding source documents improves the relevance and readability of lay summaries but does not improve factuality of lay summaries. This continues to be true in zero-shot summarization settings where we hypothesized that grounding might be even more important for factual lay summaries.
Anthology ID:
2023.bionlp-1.46
Volume:
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Dina Demner-fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Kevin Cohen
Venue:
BioNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
483–490
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bionlp-1.46
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.bionlp-1.46
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Domenic Rosati. 2023. GRASUM at BioLaySumm Task 1: Background Knowledge Grounding for Readable, Relevant, and Factual Biomedical Lay Summaries. In The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks, pages 483–490, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GRASUM at BioLaySumm Task 1: Background Knowledge Grounding for Readable, Relevant, and Factual Biomedical Lay Summaries (Rosati, BioNLP 2023)
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