%0 Conference Proceedings %T What’s in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization %A Adams, Griffin %A Alsentzer, Emily %A Ketenci, Mert %A Zucker, Jason %A Elhadad, Noémie %Y Toutanova, Kristina %Y Rumshisky, Anna %Y Zettlemoyer, Luke %Y Hakkani-Tur, Dilek %Y Beltagy, Iz %Y Bethard, Steven %Y Cotterell, Ryan %Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy %Y Zhou, Yichao %S Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies %D 2021 %8 June %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Online %F adams-etal-2021-whats %X 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. %R 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.382 %U https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.382 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.382 %P 4794-4811