Extractive evidence based medicine summarisation based on sentence-specific statistics

We present an approach for extracting 3-sentence evidence-based summaries relevant to clinical questions. We approach this task as one of query-focused, extractive, single-document summarisation using sentence-specific statistics for each target sentence. We incorporate simple statistics and domain knowledge and show that such an approach is effective for identifying informative sentences from medical abstracts. Our system is evaluated automatically using ROUGE, and we compare our results with several baselines. The ROUGE-L F-scores of our system outperform all baselines. In addition, our approach is computationally efficient, and, on a percentile rank measure, our system achieves a percentile rank of 97.3%.4 page(s