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
Bibkey:
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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.382.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.382.mp4
Data
CNN/Daily Mail