Abstracts or full text? Evaluating input scope and computational efficiency in biomedical lay summarization

Title:Abstracts or full text? Evaluating input scope and computational efficiency in biomedical lay summarization

Abstract:Biomedical research articles are mainly written for experts and often contain terms that are difficult for the general public to understand. Automated lay summarization has become a solution to make biomedical knowledge easier for patients and the public to understand. However, generating lay summaries from full-text articles requires more computing power because the articles are long and costly to process. Fine-tuning large language models for this task also requires substantial resources. This study asks two questions: (1) whether abstracts contain enough information to produce lay summaries as good as those based on full-text articles, and (2) whether few-shot learning performs as well as task-specific fine-tuning. The study used two public biomedical lay summarization datasets and two recent models, evaluated for readability, factual consistency, semantic similarity, and runtime efficiency. Results show that abstract-based summarization performs better overall. Across both datasets and models, abstract fine-tuning is 4.70 times faster, while abstract zero- and few-shot prompting is 5.31 times faster than full-text methods. These results show that abstract-based prompting reduces runtime cost while maintaining lay summary quality.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.21690 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.21690v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21690 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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