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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{adams-etal-2021-whats,
title = "What{'}s in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization",
author = "Adams, Griffin and
Alsentzer, Emily and
Ketenci, Mert and
Zucker, Jason and
Elhadad, No{\'e}mie",
editor = "Toutanova, Kristina and
Rumshisky, Anna and
Zettlemoyer, Luke and
Hakkani-Tur, Dilek and
Beltagy, Iz and
Bethard, Steven and
Cotterell, Ryan and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Zhou, Yichao",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jun,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.382/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.382",
pages = "4794--4811"
}