Faithful Summarization of Consumer Health Queries: A Cross-Lingual Framework with LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Abrar, Ajwad, Oeshy, Nafisa Tabassum, Maheru, Prianka, Tabassum, Farzana, Chowdhury, Tareque Mohmud
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Abrar, Ajwad
Oeshy, Nafisa Tabassum
Maheru, Prianka
Tabassum, Farzana
Chowdhury, Tareque Mohmud
author_facet Abrar, Ajwad
Oeshy, Nafisa Tabassum
Maheru, Prianka
Tabassum, Farzana
Chowdhury, Tareque Mohmud
contents Summarizing consumer health questions (CHQs) can ease communication in healthcare, but unfaithful summaries that misrepresent medical details pose serious risks. We propose a framework that combines TextRank-based sentence extraction and medical named entity recognition with large language models (LLMs) to enhance faithfulness in medical text summarization. In our experiments, we fine-tuned the LLaMA-2-7B model on the MeQSum (English) and BanglaCHQ-Summ (Bangla) datasets, achieving consistent improvements across quality (ROUGE, BERTScore, readability) and faithfulness (SummaC, AlignScore) metrics, and outperforming zero-shot baselines and prior systems. Human evaluation further shows that over 80\% of generated summaries preserve critical medical information. These results highlight faithfulness as an essential dimension for reliable medical summarization and demonstrate the potential of our approach for safer deployment of LLMs in healthcare contexts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_10768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Faithful Summarization of Consumer Health Queries: A Cross-Lingual Framework with LLMs
Abrar, Ajwad
Oeshy, Nafisa Tabassum
Maheru, Prianka
Tabassum, Farzana
Chowdhury, Tareque Mohmud
Computation and Language
Summarizing consumer health questions (CHQs) can ease communication in healthcare, but unfaithful summaries that misrepresent medical details pose serious risks. We propose a framework that combines TextRank-based sentence extraction and medical named entity recognition with large language models (LLMs) to enhance faithfulness in medical text summarization. In our experiments, we fine-tuned the LLaMA-2-7B model on the MeQSum (English) and BanglaCHQ-Summ (Bangla) datasets, achieving consistent improvements across quality (ROUGE, BERTScore, readability) and faithfulness (SummaC, AlignScore) metrics, and outperforming zero-shot baselines and prior systems. Human evaluation further shows that over 80\% of generated summaries preserve critical medical information. These results highlight faithfulness as an essential dimension for reliable medical summarization and demonstrate the potential of our approach for safer deployment of LLMs in healthcare contexts.
title Faithful Summarization of Consumer Health Queries: A Cross-Lingual Framework with LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10768