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Electronic health records (EHRs) are a critical tool in healthcare and capture a wide array of patient information that can inform clinical decision-making. However, the sheer volume and complexity of EHR data present challenges for healthcare providers, particularly in fast-paced environments such as intensive care units (ICUs). To address this problem, the automatic summarization of the main problems of patients from daily progress notes can be extremely helpful. Furthermore, by accurately predicting ICU patients' lengths of stay (LOSs), resource allocation and management can be optimized, allowing for a more efficient flow of patients within the healthcare system. This work proposes a hybrid method to summarize EHR notes and studies the potential of these summaries together with structured data for the prediction of LOSs of ICU patients. Our investigation demonstrates the effectiveness of combining extractive and abstractive summarization techniques with a concept-based method combined with a text-to-text transfer transformer (T5), which shows the most promising results. By integrating the generated summaries and diagnoses with other features, our study contributes to the accurate prediction of LOSs, with a support vector machine emerging as our best-performing classifier with an accuracy of 77.5%, surpassing existing systems and highlighting the potential for optimal allocation of resources within ICUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extractive summarization, a pivotal task in natural language processing, aims to distill essential content from lengthy documents efficiently. Traditional methods often struggle with capturing the nuanced interdependencies between different document elements, which is crucial to producing coherent and contextually rich summaries. This paper introduces Multi-Element Contextual Hypergraph Extractive Summarizer (MCHES), a novel framework designed to address these challenges through an advanced hypergraph-based approach. MCHES constructs a contextual hypergraph where sentences form nodes interconnected by multiple types of hyperedges, including semantic, narrative, and discourse hyperedges. This structure captures complex relationships and maintains narrative flow, enhancing semantic coherence across the summary. The framework incorporates a Contextual Homogenization Module (CHM), which harmonizes features from diverse hyperedges, and a Hypergraph Contextual Attention Module (HCA), which employs a dual-level attention mechanism to focus on the most salient information. The innovative Extractive Read-out Strategy selects the optimal set of sentences to compose the final summary, ensuring that the latter reflects the core themes and logical structure of the original text. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods. Specifically, MCHES achieves an average ROUGE-1 score of 44.756, a ROUGE-2 score of 24.963, and a ROUGE-L score of 42.477 on the CNN/DailyMail dataset, surpassing the best-performing baseline by 3.662%, 3.395%, and 2.166% respectively. Furthermore, MCHES achieves BERTScore values of 59.995 on CNN/DailyMail, 88.424 on XSum, and 89.285 on PubMed, indicating superior semantic alignment with human-generated summaries. Additionally, MCHES achieves MoverScore values of 87.432 on CNN/DailyMail, 60.549 on XSum, and 59.739 on PubMed, highlighting its effectiveness in maintaining content movement and ordering. These results confirm that the MCHES framework sets a new standard for extractive summarization by leveraging contextual hypergraphs for better narrative and thematic fidelity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a multi-document summarization task, if the user can decide on the summary topic, the generated summary can better align with the reader's specific needs and preferences. This paper addresses the issue of overly general content generation by common multi-document summarization models and proposes a topic-oriented multi-document summarization (TOMDS) approach. The method is divided into two stages: extraction and abstraction. During the extractive stage, it primarily identifies and retrieves paragraphs relevant to the designated topic, subsequently sorting them based on their relevance to the topic and forming an initial subset of documents. In the abstractive stage, building upon the transformer architecture, the process includes two parts: encoding and decoding. In the encoding part, we integrated an external discourse parsing module that focuses on both micro-level within-paragraph semantic relationships and macro-level inter-paragraph connections, effectively combining these with the implicit relationships in the source document to produce more enriched semantic features. In the decoding part, we incorporated a topic-aware attention mechanism that dynamically zeroes in on information pertinent to the chosen topic, thus guiding the summary generation process more effectively. The proposed model was primarily evaluated using the standard text summary dataset WikiSum. The experimental results show that our model significantly enhanced the thematic relevance and flexibility of the summaries and improved the accuracy of grammatical and semantic comprehension in the generated summaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fine-tuning a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence-based language model has significantly advanced the field of abstractive summarization. However, the early models of abstractive summarization were limited by the gap between training and inference, and they did not fully utilize the potential of the language model. Recent studies have introduced a two-stage framework that allows the second-stage model to re-rank the candidate summary generated by the first-stage model, to resolve these limitations. In this study, we point out that the supervision method performed in the existing re-ranking model of the two-stage abstractive summarization framework cannot learn detailed and complex information of the data. In addition, we present the problem of positional bias in the existing encoder–decoder-based re-ranking model. To address these two limitations, this study proposes a hierarchical supervision method that jointly performs summary and sentence-level supervision. For sentence-level supervision, we designed two sentence-level loss functions: intra- and inter-intra-sentence ranking losses. Compared to the existing abstractive summarization model, the proposed method exhibited a performance improvement for both the CNN/DM and XSum datasets. The proposed model outperformed the baseline model under a few-shot setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: Information overload challenges decision-making in the Industry 4.0 era. While Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially Automatic Text Summarization (ATS), offers solutions, issues with factual accuracy persist. This research bridges cognitive neuroscience and NLP, aiming to improve model interpretability. (2) Methods: This research examined four fact extraction techniques: dependency relation, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and TF-IDF, in order to explore their correlation with human EEG signals. Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) was applied to gauge the relationship between language models and brain activity. (3) Results: Named entity recognition showed the highest sensitivity to EEG signals, marking the most significant differentiation between factual and non-factual words with a score of −0.99. The dependency relation followed with −0.90, while part-of-speech tagging and TF-IDF resulted in 0.07 and −0.52, respectively. Deep language models such as GloVe, BERT, and GPT-2 exhibited noticeable influences on RSA scores, highlighting the nuanced interplay between brain activity and these models. (4) Conclusions: Our findings emphasize the crucial role of named entity recognition and dependency relations in fact extraction and demonstrate the independent effects of different models and TOIs on RSA scores. These insights aim to refine algorithms to reflect human text processing better, thereby enhancing ATS models' factual integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions are central to understanding contemporary journalism; however, they are overlooked in automatic news summarization. Actually, summaries are an entry point to the source article that could favor some emotions to captivate the reader. Nevertheless, the emotional content of summarization corpora and the emotional behavior of summarization models are still unexplored. In this work, we explore the usage of established methodologies to study the emotional content of summarization corpora and the emotional behavior of summarization models. Using these methodologies, we study the emotional content of two widely used summarization corpora: Cnn/Dailymail and Xsum, and the capabilities of three state-of-the-art transformer-based abstractive systems for eliciting emotions in the generated summaries: Bart, Pegasus, and T5. The main significant findings are as follows: (i) emotions are persistent in the two summarization corpora, (ii) summarizers approach moderately well the emotions of the reference summaries, and (iii) more than 75% of the emotions introduced by novel words in generated summaries are present in the reference ones. The combined use of these methodologies has allowed us to conduct a satisfactory study of the emotional content in news summarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing amount of legal information available online is overwhelming for both citizens and legal professionals, making it difficult and time-consuming to find relevant information and keep up with the latest legal developments. Automatic text summarization techniques can be highly beneficial as they save time, reduce costs, and lessen the cognitive load of legal professionals. However, applying these techniques to legal documents poses several challenges due to the complexity of legal documents and the lack of needed resources, especially in linguistically under-resourced languages, such as the Greek language. In this paper, we address automatic summarization of Greek legal documents. A major challenge in this area is the lack of suitable datasets in the Greek language. In response, we developed a new metadata-rich dataset consisting of selected judgments from the Supreme Civil and Criminal Court of Greece, alongside their reference summaries and category tags, tailored for the purpose of automated legal document summarization. We also adopted several state-of-the-art methods for abstractive and extractive summarization and conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the methods using both human and automatic metrics. Our results: (i) revealed that, while extractive methods exhibit average performance, abstractive methods generate moderately fluent and coherent text, but they tend to receive low scores in relevance and consistency metrics; (ii) indicated the need for metrics that capture better a legal document summary's coherence, relevance, and consistency; (iii) demonstrated that fine-tuning BERT models on a specific upstream task can significantly improve the model's performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]