FactPICO: Factuality Evaluation for Plain Language Summarization of Medical Evidence

Sebastian Joseph, Lily Chen, Jan Trienes, Hannah Göke, Monika Coers, Wei Xu, Byron Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li


Abstract
Plain language summarization with LLMs can be useful for improving textual accessibility of technical content. But how factual are these summaries in a high-stakes domain like medicine? This paper presents FactPICO, a factuality benchmark for plain language summarization of medical texts describing randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are the basis of evidence-based medicine and can directly inform patient treatment. FactPICO consists of 345 plain language summaries of RCT abstracts generated from three LLMs (i.e., GPT-4, Llama-2, and Alpaca), with fine-grained evaluation and natural language rationales from experts. We assess the factuality of critical elements of RCTs in those summaries: Populations, Interventions, Comparators, Outcomes (PICO), as well as the reported findings concerning these. We also evaluate the correctness of the extra information (e.g., explanations) added by LLMs. Using FactPICO, we benchmark a range of existing factuality metrics, including the newly devised ones based on LLMs. We find that plain language summarization of medical evidence is still challenging, especially when balancing between simplicity and factuality, and that existing metrics correlate poorly with expert judgments on the instance level.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.459
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8437–8464
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.459
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.459
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Joseph, Lily Chen, Jan Trienes, Hannah Göke, Monika Coers, Wei Xu, Byron Wallace, and Junyi Jessy Li. 2024. FactPICO: Factuality Evaluation for Plain Language Summarization of Medical Evidence. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8437–8464, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FactPICO: Factuality Evaluation for Plain Language Summarization of Medical Evidence (Joseph et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.459.pdf