The best evidence concerning comparative treatment effectiveness comes from clinical trials, the results of which are reported in unstructured articles. Medical experts must manually extract information from articles to inform decision-making, which is time-consuming and expensive. Here we consider the end-to-end task of both (a) extracting treatments and outcomes from full-text articles describing clinical trials (entity identification) and, (b) inferring the reported results for the former with respect to the latter (relation extraction). We introduce new data for this task, and evaluate models that have recently achieved state-of-the-art results on similar tasks in Natural Language Processing. We then propose a new method motivated by how trial results are typically presented that outperforms these purely data-driven baselines. Finally, we run a fielded evaluation of the model with a non-profit seeking to identify existing drugs that might be re-purposed for cancer, showing the potential utility of end-to-end evidence extraction systems.
Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have fueled the emergence of human-AI collaboration, a setting where AI is a coequal partner. Especially in clinical decision-making, it has the potential to improve treatment quality by assisting overworked medical professionals. Even though research has started to investigate the utilization of AI for clinical decision-making, its potential benefits do not imply its adoption by medical professionals. While several studies have started to analyze adoption criteria from a technical perspective, research providing a human-centered perspective with a focus on AI's potential for becoming a coequal team member in the decision-making process remains limited. Therefore, in this work, we identify factors for the adoption of human-AI collaboration by conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with experts in the healthcare domain. We identify six relevant adoption factors and highlight existing tensions between them and effective human-AI collaboration.
The COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied by a massive "infodemic" that makes it hard to identify concise and credible information for COVID-19-related questions, like incubation time, infection rates, or the effectiveness of vaccines. As a novel solution, our paper is concerned with designing a question-answering system based on modern technologies from natural language processing to overcome information overload and misinformation in pandemic situations. To carry out our research, we followed a design science research approach and applied Ingwersen's cognitive model of information retrieval interaction to inform our design process from a socio-technical lens. On this basis, we derived prescriptive design knowledge in terms of design requirements and design principles, which we translated into the construction of a prototypical instantiation. Our implementation is based on the comprehensive CORD-19 dataset, and we demonstrate our artifact's usefulness by evaluating its answer quality based on a sample of COVID-19 questions labeled by biomedical experts.
Recruitment in large organisations often involves interviewing a large number of candidates. The process is resource intensive and complex. Therefore, it is important to carry it out efficiently and effectively. Planning the selection process consists of several problems, each of which maps to one or the other well-known computing problem. Research that looks at each of these problems in isolation is rich and mature. However, research that takes an integrated view of the problem is not common. In this paper, we take two of the most important aspects of the application processing problem, namely review/interview panel creation and interview scheduling. We have implemented our approach as a prototype system and have used it to automatically plan the interview process of a real-life data set. Our system provides a distinctly better plan than the existing practice, which is predominantly manual. We have explored various algorithmic options and have customised them to solve these panel creation and interview scheduling problems. We have evaluated these design options experimentally on a real data set and have presented our observations. Our prototype and experimental process and results may be a very good starting point for a full-fledged development project for automating application processing process.
Despite the recent advancements in abstractive summarization systems leveraged from large-scale datasets and pre-trained language models, the factual correctness of the summary is still insufficient. One line of trials to mitigate this problem is to include a post-editing process that can detect and correct factual errors in the summary. In building such a post-editing system, it is strongly required that 1) the process has a high success rate and interpretability and 2) has a fast running time. Previous approaches focus on regeneration of the summary using the autoregressive models, which lack interpretability and require high computing resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient factual error correction system RFEC based on entities retrieval post-editing process. RFEC first retrieves the evidence sentences from the original document by comparing the sentences with the target summary. This approach greatly reduces the length of text for a system to analyze. Next, RFEC detects the entity-level errors in the summaries by considering the evidence sentences and substitutes the wrong entities with the accurate entities from the evidence sentences. Experimental results show that our proposed error correction system shows more competitive performance than baseline methods in correcting the factual errors with a much faster speed.
In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of devices with virtual assistants (e.g: Siri, Google Home, Alexa) in our living rooms and kitchens. As a result of this, these devices receive several queries about recipes. All these queries will contain terms relating to a "recipe-domain" i.e: they will contain dish-names, ingredients, cooking times, dietary preferences etc. Extracting these recipe-relevant aspects from the query thus becomes important when it comes to addressing the user's information need. Our project focuses on extracting ingredients from such plain-text user utterances. Our best performing model was a fine-tuned BERT which achieved an F1-score of $95.01$. We have released all our code in a GitHub repository.
Biomedical Question Answering (BQA) has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its promising application prospect. It is a challenging task because the biomedical questions are professional and usually vary widely. Existing question answering methods answer all questions with a homogeneous model, leading to various types of questions competing for the shared parameters, which will confuse the model decision for each single type of questions. In this paper, in order to alleviate the parameter competition problem, we propose a Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) based question answering method called MoEBQA that decouples the computation for different types of questions by sparse routing. To be specific, we split a pretrained Transformer model into bottom and top blocks. The bottom blocks are shared by all the examples, aiming to capture the general features. The top blocks are extended to an MoE version that consists of a series of independent experts, where each example is assigned to a few experts according to its underlying question type. MoEBQA automatically learns the routing strategy in an end-to-end manner so that each expert tends to deal with the question types it is expert in. We evaluate MoEBQA on three BQA datasets constructed based on real examinations. The results show that our MoE extension significantly boosts the performance of question answering models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we elaborately analyze our MoE modules to reveal how MoEBQA works and find that it can automatically group the questions into human-readable clusters.
This paper introduces QAConv, a new question answering (QA) dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. We focus on informative conversations, including business emails, panel discussions, and work channels. Unlike open-domain and task-oriented dialogues, these conversations are usually long, complex, asynchronous, and involve strong domain knowledge. In total, we collect 34,608 QA pairs from 10,259 selected conversations with both human-written and machine-generated questions. We use a question generator and a dialogue summarizer as auxiliary tools to collect and recommend questions. The dataset has two testing scenarios: chunk mode and full mode, depending on whether the grounded partial conversation is provided or retrieved. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art pretrained QA systems have limited zero-shot performance and tend to predict our questions as unanswerable. Our dataset provides a new training and evaluation testbed to facilitate QA on conversations research.
Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a combination of medical artificial intelligence and popular VQA challenges. Given a medical image and a clinically relevant question in natural language, the medical VQA system is expected to predict a plausible and convincing answer. Although the general-domain VQA has been extensively studied, the medical VQA still needs specific investigation and exploration due to its task features. In the first part of this survey, we cover and discuss the publicly available medical VQA datasets up to date about the data source, data quantity, and task feature. In the second part, we review the approaches used in medical VQA tasks. In the last part, we analyze some medical-specific challenges for the field and discuss future research directions.
Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to identify and classify clinical terms such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, exams, and body parts in electronic health records, which is a fundamental and crucial task for clinical and translational research. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved significant success in named entity recognition and many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Most of these algorithms are trained end to end, and can automatically learn features from large scale labeled datasets. However, these data-driven methods typically lack the capability of processing rare or unseen entities. Previous statistical methods and feature engineering practice have demonstrated that human knowledge can provide valuable information for handling rare and unseen cases. In this paper, we address the problem by incorporating dictionaries into deep neural networks for the Chinese CNER task. Two different architectures that extend the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network and five different feature representation schemes are proposed to handle the task. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset show that the proposed method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning methods.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.