A Dataset and Benchmark for Consumer Healthcare Question Summarization

The quest for seeking health information has swamped the web with consumers' health-related questions. Generally, consumers use overly descriptive and peripheral information to express their medical condition or other healthcare needs, contributing to the challenges of natural language understanding. One way to address this challenge is to summarize the questions and distill the key information of the original question. Recently, large-scale datasets have significantly propelled the development of several summarization tasks, such as multi-document summarization and dialogue summarization. However, a lack of domain-expert annotated dataset for the consumer healthcare questions summarization task inhibits the development of an efficient summarization system. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset CHQ-Summ that contains 1507 domain-expert annotated consumer health questions and corresponding summaries. The dataset is derived from the community question answering forum and therefore provides a valuable resource for understanding consumer health-related posts on social media. We benchmark the dataset on multiple state-of-the-art summarization models to show the effectiveness of the dataset.