Attribute Structuring Improves LLM-Based Evaluation of Clinical Text Summaries
This work addresses the problem of trustworthy evaluation of clinical summaries for health decision-support and research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM-based methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of evaluating clinical text summaries by introducing Attribute Structuring (AS), a framework that decomposes evaluation into simpler tasks using LLMs, resulting in improved alignment with human annotations and enabling efficient human auditing.
Summarizing clinical text is crucial in health decision-support and clinical research. Large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential to generate accurate clinical text summaries, but still struggle with issues regarding grounding and evaluation, especially in safety-critical domains such as health. Holistically evaluating text summaries is challenging because they may contain unsubstantiated information. Here, we explore a general mitigation framework using Attribute Structuring (AS), which structures the summary evaluation process. It decomposes the evaluation process into a grounded procedure that uses an LLM for relatively simple structuring and scoring tasks, rather than the full task of holistic summary evaluation. Experiments show that AS consistently improves the correspondence between human annotations and automated metrics in clinical text summarization. Additionally, AS yields interpretations in the form of a short text span corresponding to each output, which enables efficient human auditing, paving the way towards trustworthy evaluation of clinical information in resource-constrained scenarios. We release our code, prompts, and an open-source benchmark at https://github.com/microsoft/attribute-structuring.