In the evolving landscape of clinical Natural Language Generation (NLG), assessing abstractive text quality remains challenging, as existing methods often overlook generative task complexities. This work aimed to examine the current state of automated evaluation metrics in NLG in healthcare. To have a robust and well validated baseline with which to examine the alignment of these metrics, we created a comprehensive human evaluation framework. Employing ChatGPT-3.5-turbo generative output, we correlated human judgments with each metric. None of the metrics demonstrated high alignment; however, the SapBERT score-a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)- showed the best results. This underscores the importance of incorporating domain-specific knowledge into evaluation efforts. Our work reveals the deficiency in quality evaluations for generated text and introduces our comprehensive human evaluation framework as a baseline. Future efforts should prioritize integrating medical knowledge databases to enhance the alignment of automated metrics, particularly focusing on refining the SapBERT score for improved assessments.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This work was supported by an NLM training grant to the Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine Training Program (NLM 5T15LM007359). YG was supported by K99LM014308 and DD, MA were supported by R01LM012973.

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