4 research outputs found
Clinical Text Summarization: Adapting Large Language Models Can Outperform Human Experts
Sifting through vast textual data and summarizing key information imposes a
substantial burden on how clinicians allocate their time. Although large
language models (LLMs) have shown immense promise in natural language
processing (NLP) tasks, their efficacy across diverse clinical summarization
tasks has not yet been rigorously examined. In this work, we employ domain
adaptation methods on eight LLMs, spanning six datasets and four distinct
summarization tasks: radiology reports, patient questions, progress notes, and
doctor-patient dialogue. Our thorough quantitative assessment reveals
trade-offs between models and adaptation methods in addition to instances where
recent advances in LLMs may not lead to improved results. Further, in a
clinical reader study with six physicians, we depict that summaries from the
best adapted LLM are preferable to human summaries in terms of completeness and
correctness. Our ensuing qualitative analysis delineates mutual challenges
faced by both LLMs and human experts. Lastly, we correlate traditional
quantitative NLP metrics with reader study scores to enhance our understanding
of how these metrics align with physician preferences. Our research marks the
first evidence of LLMs outperforming human experts in clinical text
summarization across multiple tasks. This implies that integrating LLMs into
clinical workflows could alleviate documentation burden, empowering clinicians
to focus more on personalized patient care and other irreplaceable human
aspects of medicine.Comment: 23 pages, 22 figure
Biomedical Question Answering: A Survey of Approaches and Challenges
Automatic Question Answering (QA) has been successfully applied in various
domains such as search engines and chatbots. Biomedical QA (BQA), as an
emerging QA task, enables innovative applications to effectively perceive,
access and understand complex biomedical knowledge. There have been tremendous
developments of BQA in the past two decades, which we classify into 5
distinctive approaches: classic, information retrieval, machine reading
comprehension, knowledge base and question entailment approaches. In this
survey, we introduce available datasets and representative methods of each BQA
approach in detail. Despite the developments, BQA systems are still immature
and rarely used in real-life settings. We identify and characterize several key
challenges in BQA that might lead to this issue, and discuss some potential
future directions to explore.Comment: In submission to ACM Computing Survey
Development of a Corpus for UserÂbased Scientific Question Answering
Tese de mestrado, Bioinformática e Biologia Computacional, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2021In recent years Question & Answering (QA) tasks became particularly relevant in the research field of natural language understanding. However, the lack of good quality datasets has been an important limiting factor in the quest for better models. Particularly in the biomedical domain, the scarcity of gold standard labelled datasets has been a recognized obstacle given its idiosyncrasies and complexities often require the participation of skilled domain¬specific experts in producing such datasets. To address this issue, a method for automatically gather Question¬Answer pairs from online QA biomedical forums has been suggested yielding a corpus named BiQA. The authors describe several strategies to validate this new dataset but a human manual verification has not been conducted. With this in mind, this dissertation was set out with the objectives of performing a manual verification of a sample of 1200 questions of BiQA and also to expanding these questions, by adding features, into a new corpus of text ¬ BiQA2 ¬ with the goal of contributing with a new corpusfor biomedical QA research. Regarding the manual verification of BiQA, a methodology for its characterization was laid out and allowed the identification of an array of potential problems related to the nature of its questions and answers aptness for which possible improvement solutions were presented. Concomitantly, the proposed new BiQA2 corpus ¬ created upon the validated questions and answers from the perused samples from BiQA ¬ builds new features similar to those observed in other biomedical corpus such as the BioASQ dataset. Both BiQA and BiQA2 were applied to deep learning strategies previously submitted to the BioASQ competition to assess their performance as a source of training data. Although the results achieved with the models created using BiQA2 exhibit limited capability pertaining to the BioASQ challenge, they also show some potential to contribute positively to model training in tasks such as Document re-ranking and answering to ‘yes/no’ questions