The patient is more dead than alive: exploring the current state of the multi-document summarisation of the biomedical literature

Although multi-document summarization (MDS) of the biomedical literature is a highly valuable task that has recently attracted substantial interest, evaluation of the quality of biomedical summaries lacks consistency and transparency. In this paper, using systematic reviews as an example of biomedical MDS, we examine the summaries generated by two current models in order to understand the deficiencies of existing evaluation approaches in the context of the challenges that arise in the MDS task. Based on this analysis, we propose a new approach to human evaluation and identify several challenges that must be overcome to develop effective biomedical MDS systems.