Towards Understanding of Medical Randomized Controlled Trials by Conclusion Generation

Alexander Te-Wei Shieh, Yung-Sung Chuang, Shang-Yu Su, Yun-Nung Chen


Abstract
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) represent the paramount evidence of clinical medicine. Using machines to interpret the massive amount of RCTs has the potential of aiding clinical decision-making. We propose a RCT conclusion generation task from the PubMed 200k RCT sentence classification dataset to examine the effectiveness of sequence-to-sequence models on understanding RCTs. We first build a pointer-generator baseline model for conclusion generation. Then we fine-tune the state-of-the-art GPT-2 language model, which is pre-trained with general domain data, for this new medical domain task. Both automatic and human evaluation show that our GPT-2 fine-tuned models achieve improved quality and correctness in the generated conclusions compared to the baseline pointer-generator model. Further inspection points out the limitations of this current approach and future directions to explore.
Anthology ID:
D19-6214
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI 2019)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong
Editors:
Eben Holderness, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Alberto Lavelli, Anne-Lyse Minard, James Pustejovsky, Fabio Rinaldi
Venue:
Louhi
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
108–117
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6214
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-6214
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexander Te-Wei Shieh, Yung-Sung Chuang, Shang-Yu Su, and Yun-Nung Chen. 2019. Towards Understanding of Medical Randomized Controlled Trials by Conclusion Generation. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI 2019), pages 108–117, Hong Kong. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Understanding of Medical Randomized Controlled Trials by Conclusion Generation (Shieh et al., Louhi 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6214.pdf
Code
 MiuLab/RCT-Gen
Data
PubMed RCT