Ascle: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Medical Text Generation

This study introduces Ascle, a pioneering natural language processing (NLP) toolkit designed for medical text generation. Ascle is tailored for biomedical researchers and healthcare professionals with an easy-to-use, all-in-one solution that requires minimal programming expertise. For the first time, Ascle evaluates and provides interfaces for the latest pre-trained language models, encompassing four advanced and challenging generative functions: question-answering, text summarization, text simplification, and machine translation. In addition, Ascle integrates 12 essential NLP functions, along with query and search capabilities for clinical databases.

We fine-tuned 32 domain-specific language models and evaluated them thoroughly on 24 established benchmarks. Additionally, for the question-answering task, we conducted manual reviews with clinicians, focusing on Readability, Relevancy, Accuracy, and Completeness, to provide users with a more reliable evaluation.

The fine-tuned models consistently improved text generation tasks. For instance, it improved the machine translation task by 20.27 in terms of BLEU score. For the answer generation task, manual reviews showed the generated answers had average scores of 4.95 (out of 5), 4.43, 3.9, and 3.31 in Readability, Relevancy, Accuracy, and Completeness, respectively.

This study introduces the development and evaluation of Ascle, a user-friendly NLP toolkit designed for medical text generation. Ascle offers an all-in-one solution including four advanced generative functions: question-answering, text summarization, text simplification, and machine translation. The toolkit, its models, and associated data are publicly available via https://github.com/Yale-LILY/Ascle.