MedicalSum: A Guided Clinical Abstractive Summarization Model for Generating Medical Reports from Patient-Doctor Conversations
George Michalopoulos, Kyle Williams, Gagandeep Singh, Thomas Lin
Abstract
We introduce MedicalSum, a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architecture for summarizing medical conversations by integrating medical domain knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The novel knowledge augmentation is performed in three ways: (i) introducing a guidance signal that consists of the medical words in the input sequence, (ii) leveraging semantic type knowledge in UMLS to create clinically meaningful input embeddings, and (iii) making use of a novel weighted loss function that provides a stronger incentive for the model to correctly predict words with a medical meaning. By applying these three strategies, MedicalSum takes clinical knowledge into consideration during the summarization process and achieves state-of-the-art ROUGE score improvements of 0.8-2.1 points (including 6.2% ROUGE-1 error reduction in the PE section) when producing medical summaries of patient-doctor conversations.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.findings-emnlp.349
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Editors:
- Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4741–4749
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.349
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.349
- Cite (ACL):
- George Michalopoulos, Kyle Williams, Gagandeep Singh, and Thomas Lin. 2022. MedicalSum: A Guided Clinical Abstractive Summarization Model for Generating Medical Reports from Patient-Doctor Conversations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 4741–4749, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- MedicalSum: A Guided Clinical Abstractive Summarization Model for Generating Medical Reports from Patient-Doctor Conversations (Michalopoulos et al., Findings 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.findings-emnlp.349.pdf