Graph-Enhanced Biomedical Abstractive Summarization Via Factual Evidence Extraction

Abstract

Infusing structured semantic representations into language models is a rising research trend underpinning many natural language processing tasks that require understanding and reasoning capabilities. Decoupling factual non-ambiguous concept units from the lexical surface holds great potential in abstractive summarization, especially in the biomedical domain, where fact selection and rephrasing are made more difficult by specialized jargon and hard factuality constraints. Nevertheless, current graph-augmented contributions rely on extractive binary relations, failing to model real-world n-ary and nested biomedical interactions mentioned in the text. To alleviate this issue, we present EASumm, the first framework for biomedical abstractive summarization empowered by event extraction, namely graph-based representations of relevant medical evidence derived from the source scientific document. By relying on dual text-graph encoders, we prove the promising role of explicit event structures, achieving better or comparable performance than previous state-of-the-art models on the CDSR dataset. We conduct extensive ablation studies, including a wide experimentation of graph representation learning techniques. Finally, we offer some hints to guide future research in the field.