Do Clinicians Know How to Prompt? The Need for Automatic Prompt Optimization Help in Clinical Note Generation

Zonghai Yao, Ahmed Jaafar, Beining Wang, Zhichao Yang, Hong Yu


Abstract
This study examines the effect of prompt engineering on the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in clinical note generation. We introduce an Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) framework to refine initial prompts and compare the outputs of medical experts, non-medical experts, and APO-enhanced GPT3.5 and GPT4. Results highlight GPT4-APO’s superior performance in standardizing prompt quality across clinical note sections. A human-in-the-loop approach shows that experts maintain content quality post-APO, with a preference for their own modifications, suggesting the value of expert customization. We recommend a two-phase optimization process, leveraging APO-GPT4 for consistency and expert input for personalization.
Anthology ID:
2024.bionlp-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Makoto Miwa, Kirk Roberts, Junichi Tsujii
Venues:
BioNLP | WS
SIG:
SIGBIOMED
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
182–201
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.bionlp-1.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zonghai Yao, Ahmed Jaafar, Beining Wang, Zhichao Yang, and Hong Yu. 2024. Do Clinicians Know How to Prompt? The Need for Automatic Prompt Optimization Help in Clinical Note Generation. In Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, pages 182–201, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do Clinicians Know How to Prompt? The Need for Automatic Prompt Optimization Help in Clinical Note Generation (Yao et al., BioNLP-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.bionlp-1.15.pdf