In recent years, we have seen many Transformer based models being created to address Dialog Summarization problem. While there has been a lot of work on understanding how these models stack against each other in summarizing regular conversations such as the ones found in DialogSum dataset, there haven’t been many analysis of these models on Clinical Dialog Summarization. In this article, we describe our solution to MEDIQA-Chat 2023 Shared Tasks as part of ACL-ClinicalNLP 2023 workshop which benchmarks some of the popular Transformer Architectures such as BioBart, Flan-T5, DialogLED, and OpenAI GPT3 on the problem of Clinical Dialog Summarization. We analyse their performance on two tasks - summarizing short conversations and long conversations. In addition to this, we also benchmark two popular summarization ensemble methods and report their performance.

Most transformer models are trained on English language corpus that contain text from forums like Wikipedia and Reddit. While these models are being used in many specialized domains such as scientific peer review, legal, and healthcare, their performance is subpar because they do not contain the information present in data relevant to such specialized domains. To help these models perform as well as possible on specialized domains, one of the approaches is to collect labeled data of that particular domain and fine-tune the transformer model of choice on such data. While a good approach, it suffers from the challenge of collecting a lot of labeled data which requires significant manual effort. Another way is to use unlabeled domain-specific data to pre-train these transformer model and then fine-tune this model on labeled data. We evaluate how transformer models perform when fine-tuned on labeled data after initial pre-training with unlabeled data. We compare their performance with a transformer model fine-tuned on labeled data without initial pre-training with unlabeled data. We perform this comparison on a dataset of Scientific Peer Reviews provided by organizers of PragTag-2023 Shared Task and observe that a transformer model fine-tuned on labeled data after initial pre-training on unlabeled data using Masked Language Modelling outperforms a transformer model fine-tuned only on labeled data without initial pre-training with unlabeled data using Masked Language Modelling.