Towards Understanding Consumer Healthcare Questions on the Web with Semantically Enhanced Contrastive Learning

Shweta Yadav, Stefan Cobeli, Cornelia Caragea

Abstract: In recent years, seeking health information on the web has become a preferred way for healthcare consumers to support their information needs. Generally, healthcare consumers use long and detailed questions with several peripheral details to express their healthcare concerns, contributing to natural language understanding challenges. One way to address this challenge is by summarizing the questions. However, most of the existing abstractive summarization systems generate impeccably fluent yet factually incorrect summaries. In this paper, we present a semantically-enhanced contrastive learning-based framework for generating abstractive question summaries that are faithful and factually correct. We devised multiple strategies based on question semantics to generate the erroneous (negative) summaries, such that the model has the understanding of plausible and incorrect perturbations of the original summary. Our extensive experimental results on two benchmark consumer health question summarization datasets confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method by achieving state-of-the-art performance and generating factually correct and fluent summaries, as measured by human evaluation.