Retrieval-Augmented and Knowledge-Grounded Language Models for Faithful Clinical Medicine

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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Fenglin, Yang, Bang, You, Chenyu, Wu, Xian, Ge, Shen, Liu, Zhangdaihong, Sun, Xu, Yang, Yang, Clifton, David A.
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Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Liu, Fenglin
Yang, Bang
You, Chenyu
Wu, Xian
Ge, Shen
Liu, Zhangdaihong
Sun, Xu
Yang, Yang
Clifton, David A.
author_facet Liu, Fenglin
Yang, Bang
You, Chenyu
Wu, Xian
Ge, Shen
Liu, Zhangdaihong
Sun, Xu
Yang, Yang
Clifton, David A.
contents Language models (LMs), including large language models (such as ChatGPT), have the potential to assist clinicians in generating various clinical notes. However, LMs are prone to produce ``hallucinations'', i.e., generated content that is not aligned with facts and knowledge. In this paper, we propose the Re$^3$Writer method with retrieval-augmented generation and knowledge-grounded reasoning to enable LMs to generate faithful clinical texts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating patient discharge instructions. It requires the LMs not to only understand the patients' long clinical documents, i.e., the health records during hospitalization, but also to generate critical instructional information provided both to carers and to the patient at the time of discharge. The proposed Re$^3$Writer imitates the working patterns of physicians to first \textbf{re}trieve related working experience from historical instructions written by physicians, then \textbf{re}ason related medical knowledge. Finally, it \textbf{re}fines the retrieved working experience and reasoned medical knowledge to extract useful information, which is used to generate the discharge instructions for previously-unseen patients. Our experiments show that, using our method, the performance of five representative LMs can be substantially boosted across all metrics. Meanwhile, we show results from human evaluations to measure the effectiveness in terms of fluency, faithfulness, and comprehensiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_12777
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Retrieval-Augmented and Knowledge-Grounded Language Models for Faithful Clinical Medicine
Liu, Fenglin
Yang, Bang
You, Chenyu
Wu, Xian
Ge, Shen
Liu, Zhangdaihong
Sun, Xu
Yang, Yang
Clifton, David A.
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Language models (LMs), including large language models (such as ChatGPT), have the potential to assist clinicians in generating various clinical notes. However, LMs are prone to produce ``hallucinations'', i.e., generated content that is not aligned with facts and knowledge. In this paper, we propose the Re$^3$Writer method with retrieval-augmented generation and knowledge-grounded reasoning to enable LMs to generate faithful clinical texts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating patient discharge instructions. It requires the LMs not to only understand the patients' long clinical documents, i.e., the health records during hospitalization, but also to generate critical instructional information provided both to carers and to the patient at the time of discharge. The proposed Re$^3$Writer imitates the working patterns of physicians to first \textbf{re}trieve related working experience from historical instructions written by physicians, then \textbf{re}ason related medical knowledge. Finally, it \textbf{re}fines the retrieved working experience and reasoned medical knowledge to extract useful information, which is used to generate the discharge instructions for previously-unseen patients. Our experiments show that, using our method, the performance of five representative LMs can be substantially boosted across all metrics. Meanwhile, we show results from human evaluations to measure the effectiveness in terms of fluency, faithfulness, and comprehensiveness.
title Retrieval-Augmented and Knowledge-Grounded Language Models for Faithful Clinical Medicine
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12777