README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP

Zonghai Yao, Nandyala Siddharth Kantu, Guanghao Wei, Hieu Tran, Zhangqi Duan, Sunjae Kwon, Zhichao Yang, Hong Yu


Abstract
The advancement in healthcare has shifted focus toward patient-centric approaches, particularly in self-care and patient education, facilitated by access to Electronic Health Records (EHR). However, medical jargon in EHRs poses significant challenges in patient comprehension. To address this, we introduce a new task of automatically generating lay definitions, aiming to simplify complex medical terms into patient-friendly lay language. We first created the README dataset, an extensive collection of over 50,000 unique (medical term, lay definition) pairs and 300,000 mentions, each offering context-aware lay definitions manually annotated by domain experts. We have also engineered a data-centric Human-AI pipeline that synergizes data filtering, augmentation, and selection to improve data quality. We then used README as the training data for models and leveraged a Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to reduce hallucinations and improve the quality of model outputs. Our extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that open-source mobile-friendly models, when fine-tuned with high-quality data, are capable of matching or even surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art closed-source large language models like ChatGPT. This research represents a significant stride in closing the knowledge gap in patient education and advancing patient-centric healthcare solutions.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.737
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12609–12629
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.737
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zonghai Yao, Nandyala Siddharth Kantu, Guanghao Wei, Hieu Tran, Zhangqi Duan, Sunjae Kwon, Zhichao Yang, and Hong Yu. 2024. README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12609–12629, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP (Yao et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.737.pdf
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