Question-driven summarization of answers to consumer health questions

Automatic summarization of natural language is a widely studied area in computer science, one that is broadly applicable to anyone who needs to understand large quantities of information. In the medical domain, automatic summarization has the potential to make health information more accessible to people without medical expertise. However, to evaluate the quality of summaries generated by summarization algorithms, researchers first require gold standard, human generated summaries. Unfortunately there is no available data for the purpose of assessing summaries that help consumers of health information answer their questions. To address this issue, we present the MEDIQA-Answer Summarization dataset, the first dataset designed for question-driven, consumer-focused summarization. It contains 156 health questions asked by consumers, answers to these questions, and manually generated summaries of these answers. The dataset’s unique structure allows it to be used for at least eight different types of summarization evaluations. We also benchmark the performance of baseline and state-of-the-art deep learning approaches on the dataset, demonstrating how it can be used to evaluate automatically generated summaries.