arXiv:2505.10409cs.CL2025-05被引 3

LLM生成的医学摘要看似自然,但读者理解效果远不如人工摘要。

Are LLM-generated plain language summaries truly understandable? A large-scale crowdsourced evaluation

  • 用众包方式评估150人对LLM生成摘要的理解程度
  • 人工摘要在理解度上显著优于LLM生成版本
  • 现有自动评估指标无法反映真实理解效果,需改进

平易语言摘要(PLS)对于促进医患沟通至关重要,可帮助非专业人士理解复杂医疗信息。尽管大语言模型(LLMs)在自动生成PLS方面展现出潜力,但其在提升健康信息理解方面的有效性仍不明确。以往评估多依赖自动化分数或小样本主观评分,缺乏代表性。为此,我们通过Amazon Mechanical Turk开展大规模众包评估,共招募150名参与者,从简洁性、信息量、连贯性和忠实度等主观维度,以及多项选择题和回忆测试等客观维度评估理解效果。同时分析了10种自动化评估指标与人类判断的一致性。结果表明,虽然LLM生成的摘要在主观评价中与人工摘要难以区分,但在实际理解水平上仍显著落后。此外,自动化指标与人类判断高度不一致,质疑其适用性。本研究首次系统结合读者偏好与理解结果评估LLM生成的PLS,强调需建立超越表面质量的评估框架,并开发更注重通俗理解的生成方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Plain language summaries (PLSs) are essential for facilitating effective communication between clinicians and patients by making complex medical information easier for laypeople to understand and act upon. Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in automating PLS generation, but their effectiveness in supporting health information comprehension remains unclear. Prior evaluations have generally relied on automated scores that do not measure understandability directly, or subjective Likert-scale ratings from convenience samples with limited generalizability. To address these gaps, we conducted a large-scale crowdsourced evaluation of LLM-generated PLSs using Amazon Mechanical Turk with 150 participants. We assessed PLS quality through subjective Likert-scale ratings focusing on simplicity, informativeness, coherence, and faithfulness; and objective multiple-choice comprehension and recall measures of reader understanding. Additionally, we examined the alignment between 10 automated evaluation metrics and human judgments. Our findings indicate that while LLMs can generate PLSs that appear indistinguishable from human-written ones in subjective evaluations, human-written PLSs lead to significantly better comprehension. Furthermore, automated evaluation metrics fail to reflect human judgment, calling into question their suitability for evaluating PLSs. This is the first study to systematically evaluate LLM-generated PLSs based on both reader preferences and comprehension outcomes. Our findings highlight the need for evaluation frameworks that move beyond surface-level quality and for generation methods that explicitly optimize for layperson comprehension.

大模型评估医疗AI可读性

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