  Information retrieval (IR) for precision medicine (PM) often involves looking
for multiple pieces of evidence that characterize a patient case. This
typically includes at least the name of a condition and a genetic variation
that applies to the patient. Other factors such as demographic attributes,
comorbidities, and social determinants may also be pertinent. As such, the
retrieval problem is often formulated as ad hoc search but with multiple facets
(e.g., disease, mutation) that may need to be incorporated. In this paper, we
present a document reranking approach that combines neural query-document
matching and text summarization toward such retrieval scenarios. Our
architecture builds on the basic BERT model with three specific components for
reranking: (a). document-query matching (b). keyword extraction and (c).
facet-conditioned abstractive summarization. The outcomes of (b) and (c) are
used to essentially transform a candidate document into a concise summary that
can be compared with the query at hand to compute a relevance score. Component
(a) directly generates a matching score of a candidate document for a query.
The full architecture benefits from the complementary potential of
document-query matching and the novel document transformation approach based on
summarization along PM facets. Evaluations using NIST's TREC-PM track datasets
(2017--2019) show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. To
foster reproducibility, our code is made available here:
https://github.com/bionlproc/text-summ-for-doc-retrieval.
