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Title: Summarizing, Simplifying, and Synthesizing Medical Evidence using GPT-3 (with Varying Success)
Large language models, particularly GPT-3, are able to produce high quality summaries of general domain news articles in few- and zero-shot settings. However, it is unclear if such models are similarly capable in more specialized domains such as biomedicine. In this paper we enlist domain experts (individuals with medical training) to evaluate summaries of biomedical articles generated by GPT-3, given no supervision. We consider both single- and multi-document settings. In the former, GPT-3 is tasked with generating regular and plain-language summaries of articles describing randomized controlled trials; in the latter, we assess the degree to which GPT-3 is able to synthesize evidence reported across a collection of articles. We design an annotation scheme for evaluating model outputs, with an emphasis on assessing the factual accuracy of generated summaries. We find that while GPT-3 is able to summarize and simplify single biomedical articles faithfully, it struggles to provide accurate aggregations of findings over multiple documents. We release all data, code, and annotations used in this work.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2145479
PAR ID:
10432268
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1387–1407
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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