Articles

AbstractClinical prediction models often use structured variables and provide outcomes that are not readily interpretable by clinicians. Further, free-text medical notes may contain information not immediately available in structured variables. We propose a hierarchical CNN-transformer model with explicit attention as an interpretable, multi-task clinical language model, which achieves an AUROC …...

AbstractExisting approaches to disfluency detection heavily depend on human-annotated data. Numbers of data augmentation methods have been proposed to alleviate the dependence on labeled data. However, current augmentation approaches such as random insertion or repetition fail to resemble training corpus well and usually resulted in unnatural and limited types of …...

AbstractClinical trials provide essential guidance for practicing Evidence-Based Medicine, though often accompanying with unendurable costs and risks. To optimize the design of clinical trials, we introduce a novel Clinical Trial Result Prediction (CTRP) task. In the CTRP framework, a model takes a PICO-formatted clinical trial proposal with its background as …...

AbstractMachine reading comprehension (MRC) has achieved significant progress on the open domain in recent years, mainly due to large-scale pre-trained language models. However, it performs much worse in specific domains such as the medical field due to the lack of extensive training data and professional structural knowledge neglect. As an …...

AbstractMedical imaging is frequently used in clinical practice and trials for diagnosis and treatment. Writing imaging reports is time-consuming and can be error-prone for inexperienced radiologists. Therefore, automatically generating radiology reports is highly desired to lighten the workload of radiologists and accordingly promote clinical automation, which is an essential task …...

AbstractMedical entity normalization, which links medical mentions in the text to entities in knowledge bases, is an important research topic in medical natural language processing. In this paper, we focus on Chinese medical procedure entity normalization. However, nonstandard Chinese expressions and combined procedures present challenges in our problem. The existing …...

AbstractWe propose a generative framework for joint sequence labeling and sentence-level classification. Our model performs multiple sequence labeling tasks at once using a single, shared natural language output space. Unlike prior discriminative methods, our model naturally incorporates label semantics and shares knowledge across tasks. Our framework general purpose, performing well …...

AbstractWhile humans process language incrementally, the best language encoders currently used in NLP do not. Both bidirectional LSTMs and Transformers assume that the sequence that is to be encoded is available in full, to be processed either forwards and backwards (BiLSTMs) or as a whole (Transformers). We investigate how they …...

AbstractA frequent pattern in customer care conversations is the agents responding with appropriate webpage URLs that address users’ needs. We study the task of predicting the documents that customer care agents can use to facilitate users’ needs. We also introduce a new public dataset which supports the aforementioned problem. Using …...

AbstractSince obtaining a perfect training dataset (i.e., a dataset which is considerably large, unbiased, and well-representative of unseen cases) is hardly possible, many real-world text classifiers are trained on the available, yet imperfect, datasets. These classifiers are thus likely to have undesirable properties. For instance, they may have biases against …...

AbstractLinguistic steganography studies how to hide secret messages in natural language cover texts. Traditional methods aim to transform a secret message into an innocent text via lexical substitution or syntactical modification. Recently, advances in neural language models (LMs) enable us to directly generate cover text conditioned on the secret message. …...

AbstractMachine learning models are trained to find patterns in data. NLP models can inadvertently learn socially undesirable patterns when training on gender biased text. In this work, we propose a novel, general framework that decomposes gender bias in text along several pragmatic and semantic dimensions: bias from the gender of …...

AbstractPre-trained Transformers are now ubiquitous in natural language processing, but despite their high end-task performance, little is known empirically about whether they are calibrated. Specifically, do these models’ posterior probabilities provide an accurate empirical measure of how likely the model is to be correct on a given example? We focus …...

AbstractWe introduce Electric, an energy-based cloze model for representation learning over text. Like BERT, it is a conditional generative model of tokens given their contexts. However, Electric does not use masking or output a full distribution over tokens that could occur in a context. Instead, it assigns a scalar energy …...

AbstractSyntactic parsers have dominated natural language understanding for decades. Yet, their syntactic interpretations are losing centrality in downstream tasks due to the success of large-scale textual representation learners. In this paper, we propose KERMIT (Kernel-inspired Encoder with Recursive Mechanism for Interpretable Trees) to embed symbolic syntactic parse trees into artificial …...

AbstractThe neural attention mechanism plays an important role in many natural language processing applications. In particular, multi-head attention extends single-head attention by allowing a model to jointly attend information from different perspectives. However, without explicit constraining, multi-head attention may suffer from attention collapse, an issue that makes different heads extract …...

AbstractOne reason pretraining on self-supervised linguistic tasks is effective is that it teaches models features that are helpful for language understanding. However, we want pretrained models to learn not only to represent linguistic features, but also to use those features preferentially during fine-turning. With this goal in mind, we introduce …...

AbstractMost modern NLP systems make use of pre-trained contextual representations that attain astonishingly high performance on a variety of tasks. Such high performance should not be possible unless some form of linguistic structure inheres in these representations, and a wealth of research has sprung up on probing for it. In …...

AbstractDeep pre-trained contextualized encoders like BERT demonstrate remarkable performance on a range of downstream tasks. A recent line of research in probing investigates the linguistic knowledge implicitly learned by these models during pre-training. While most work in probing operates on the task level, linguistic tasks are rarely uniform and can …...

AbstractTransformer models have advanced the state of the art in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present a new Transformer architecture, “Extended Transformer Construction” (ETC), that addresses two key challenges of standard Transformer architectures, namely scaling input length and encoding structured inputs. To scale attention to …...